


Intersecting Parallels

by Melime



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Minor Character Death, Post-Episode: s07e17-18 Heroes, Secret Relationship, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2019-10-02 05:18:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 32,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17258273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: Unable to cope with Janet's death, Sam searches for closure along with an alternate version of Janet. Heartbroken over Sam's death, Janet feels lost until an alternate version of Sam comes in contact. Two parallel lives that were never meant to cross, but can't stand to be apart. They resort to meeting in secret, neither willing to abandon her own universe, until an attack leads to the destruction of one of their worlds.Updates every two weeks.





	1. Heroes save lives

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Paralelas Interseccionadas](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17258321) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> After over three years of planning, this story is finally coming to life. It's the longer version of the same story told in the [Not the one you lost](https://archiveofourown.org/series/519415) series, which was written in part to assist in the plotting of this multichapter. The series covers the major plot points of this story and contains spoilers, including the ending.  
> At the time of posting the first chapter, part I (chapters 01-25) is written, updates will become more frequent after the entire story is written, at a current prediction of 75 chapters and three parts. Despite the tone of part I, this is mostly a story about love, with part I dealing with grief, part II with learning to love again, and part III with hope and happiness.  
> Specific warnings are provided at the end of each chapter if applicable. Those warnings may contain spoilers for the chapter in question.

Everything around her was chaos.

People yelling, guns shooting, blast fire. It was a battle, and battle was nothing if not chaos and blood and pain.

She didn’t notice, not at first. She didn’t see it, how could she not see it? There was so much, so much happening around her, a distraction could get her killed, could get other people killed, she needed to focus on the enemy and nothing else, nothing else, no matter how important. She didn’t see it happening, she should have seen it, she couldn’t have seen it.

The moment she realized what happened would forever be lost, the shock replaced any memory with a faint fogginess.

Time stood still, her mind stopped working, she couldn’t think, couldn’t feel.

Then everything came back, all at once.

They were still in the middle of the battlefield, they needed to worry about leaving, not about the cost of that battle. Worrying about what couldn’t be changed was the fastest path to losing, and no one would be taken prisoner in that battle.

So she fought and fought and fought, to go back, to get home, to get… They needed to bring Janet back home, and they needed to make sure no one else would be hurt.

Jack was still seriously wounded, and he wasn’t the only one. She had to worry about the people that could still be saved, because she cared about them, and because Janet’s sacrifice couldn’t be in vain.

When everything was too much to process, the soldier took over, and she didn’t have to worry about her feelings.

Everything happened so fast, and so impossibly slow.

All was well. It was a trap. Jack was dying. Janet was dead. They ran. They got back.

Just that, yet so much.

She crossed the gate, they were all back, but they were not all safe. Janet was dead, carried by the same people she had saved so many times before. None of them would still be here if it wasn’t for her, and they couldn’t even keep her safe.

They failed, every single one of them failed. It was the most basic of concepts, keep the doctor safe, keep her safe and get out, don’t leave anyone behind. It should have been easy, so easy, they had done it so many times before, but it only took one mistake, one day when fortune was not on their side, and then all the care that was taken in the past amounted to nothing.

She crossed the gate, and she barely got a couple steps before the emotions washed over her, too strong to fight.

She ran, from reality, her feelings, Janet’s body. Everything and nothing.

The camera crew was there, but she hardly even noticed. She blew past them, and as they tried talking to her, she just yelled and pushed them away, not even noticing her own worlds.

All that mattered was to get away of it all. She needed to go away, as far away as she could, if she kept moving maybe all the pain wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.

She was crying long before she got to her office, and as soon as she closed the door, she fell apart completely.

The weight of Janet’s death hit her all at once as she let her body slide against the door and onto the floor.

Janet was dead, gone. Just like that, a mission that wasn’t in any way important somehow ended with Janet dead.

It didn’t make any sense, there was no meaning to it.

Their lives were dangerous ones, and members of the SGC died often, but those were sacrifices or mistakes, and Janet’s death was neither.

It was pointless, and it wasn’t a mistake on her part, and if Janet had known, she would still have gone, because otherwise other people would have died, and this was just who she was.

Janet wouldn’t have accepted to be safe while others died, it would have been against her nature. What would they do now without her?

She tried to keep her thoughts on the injustice of it all, to think only of the doctor who saved the lives of everyone there so many times. She couldn’t think of anything else, because if she did, then she wouldn’t be able to function enough even to return home.

But the thoughts and the feelings still came, as unwanted as they were.

She thought about how she kissed Janet goodnight two nights before, the last time they had seen each other in private. She thought about the way Janet looked sadly at her as she left, in that way that said that she wished above all else that their relationship wouldn’t be a secret. She thought about wishing that, just once, she could stay without the fear of losing her career.

She loved Janet, without a doubt. She loved her with all her heart and were it not for the importance of their work at the SGC, she would have sent it all to hell just so they could be together.

It was like having her heart cut out from her chest, she didn’t know what to feel, didn’t know what to do. She wished Janet was there.

She needed to get her emotions under control, she had already cried in front of everyone, was even caught on tape doing that, she couldn’t keep on with this behavior.

Wouldn’t it be grand? To be able to hide their relationship for years only to be caught after Janet had already died?

She tried to push it all away, lock it all away someplace where it couldn’t hurt her anymore. Maybe if she could stop herself from thinking about it, she could stop herself from feeling all this pain.

Janet was her friend, she was her friend and she couldn’t be anything else. Sam had to grieve for a friend, which meant she couldn’t be sitting on the floor of her office crying uncontrollably. She could be sad, she could cry, she could suffer, but not like this.

So not only did she have to put herself under control, but she had to learn the exact measure of her pretense. Show her grief at the exact right dose.

It was too much, she didn’t know how to do this, didn’t know how to act, didn’t know…

Her thoughts were spiraling, she couldn’t bring herself to think clearly.

She had to leave, she needed to leave, now.

\---

No one tried to stop her when she left.

She tried to hide the evidence of her tears, but she wasn’t one for makeup and her office had no mirrors, so she was sure she still looked distraught. There was no point in hiding, anyway, she had been seen crying.

All she needed to do was to stay calm, to keep under control, for just long enough that she could get to her car and leave. She didn’t even need to get home, all she needed to do was to leave that place before she did or said something that she couldn’t take back.

No one talked to her, or asked her anything.

Most people wouldn’t dare, the only ones who were close enough to her to ask her about how she was feeling were the members of the SG-1, and with Jack hurt, Teal’c and Daniel would be staying next to him.

She should be there too, but all that she dared was to ask about his state, receiving confirmation that he was out of danger. Going there now would be too emotional for her, and perhaps the only thing that could rival her revealing her relationship to Janet would be if others began to suspect she was involved with her Commanding Officer. She couldn’t defend herself from the rumors without using the truth anymore than she could defend herself from the truth itself.

Caring for her friend would have to wait until she could keep herself under control.

She left the SGC, and no one stopped her, no one talked to her, no one would risk another explosion of emotion. She didn’t even say she was leaving, she just left, not trusting herself to do anything else.

She drove halfway to Janet’s house before realizing what she was doing.

Looking to Janet for comfort was an ingrained habit, so much so that she didn’t need to think about driving there, it was just the most natural thing to do when she was hurting so.

She stopped the car on the side of the road, and pressed her hands hard against the steering wheel, trying and failing to stop them from shaking.

She wasn’t going to break down in the middle of the road. She wasn’t going to lose control in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t going to start crying again in her own car.

She told herself that over and over, as if by thinking the same words again and again she could control the flow of emotions still running through her, but it was all for nothing.

First came the sobbing, then the tears and the desperate noises that she couldn’t make when there were others around her.

It hurt, losing Janet hurt more than anything imaginable, and she didn’t know how to cope, didn’t know what to do.

She couldn’t feel this, couldn’t let herself be taken by her emotions in such ways. She had to be strong, for herself as well as for Cassie.

She didn’t even know if Cassie knew about it yet. She was away in college, and Sam didn’t want to imagine how they would tell her. A phone call was much too impersonal, but it would allow for the news to be given by someone she knew, while a visit of a member of air force seemed too distant.

She wanted to leave and go find Cassie, but she couldn’t do it, couldn’t justify it to everyone else, even if Cassie deserved to hear it from her. In another life, Cassie could have been her daughter too, and she loved her as such.

It was one of the unfairness in life, one of the many things that were denied of her, part of the life she couldn’t have. The family that she wanted and would never have.

Cassie wasn’t a child anymore, but she was still far away from being able to live without any support. With Janet gone, Sam was all that she had left, and Sam wouldn’t abandon her now. Cassie was her goddaughter, after all, it was only natural that she would care for her, especially now that she was alone.

There was so much to be done, arrangements and responsibilities, all the things that came with a death in the family and that Cassie wouldn’t know how to deal with. Cassie had lost so much already, but she was a child then, and in another planet, another civilization, things were not how they were on Earth.

Sam would have to be the one to do it, she couldn’t let this too fall on Cassie, and to do that, she needed to be strong, she needed to pull herself together and act as someone who had lost a friend in a job where they had friends dying every day.

It was the only way.

She forced herself to stop crying, but gave up on fighting her instincts. Janet’s house would be empty now, and no one would think to check it. There was no harm in going there, in trying to feel her presence in what she wished was their home. Even without Janet there, it was better than the alternative, if she had to be alone, at least she wanted to be alone there.

She would allow herself one night, just one night to feel everything that was threatening to burn a hole in her chest. One night, and then the next day she would go back to acting as she should, and she would be what everyone expected of her.

No one would know about her feelings for Janet, no one would know how much she loved her.

She would go after Cassie and make sure that she was okay, or at least as well as she could be doing under the circumstances, and Sam would offer to help her with all the necessary arrangements.

She would go back to work and be sad but not devastated, she would be emotional but not falling apart.

It was far from a perfect solution, but it was what she had. If she couldn’t stop herself from suffering, she had to contain it. No one could know what she was feeling.

She parked in front of Janet’s house like she always did, and opened the door with her key like she always did. It would be so easy to pretend that everything was normal, that nothing had happened that day, but still, she couldn’t.

She dragged herself to the bedroom and let her body fall to the bed, grabbing Janet’s pillow. Everything smelled of her, everything still smelled of her and that was what made Sam start crying again.

It was too much, it was all too much, and she wanted nothing else than to wake up and find out that this had all been a nightmare, that Janet would be by her side when she woke up.

Sleep was slow to take her, and she woke up alone, to the cruel realization that all of her memories were true.

Janet was really gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: descriptions of Janet's canon death, heavy angst, grief, guilt, lost of emotional control, denial, references to DADT.


	2. Heroes never die

It wasn’t supposed to have happened, not like this.

Sam was… Sam was their champion, their hero, their most talented scientist.

It shouldn’t have happened like this, it made no sense.

They were supposed to win. Wasn’t that how things went? The heroes always win, the good guys don’t die in the middle of a pointless battle.

It wasn’t supposed to end up like this.

Sam was too important to die. Too important to Earth, too important to the SGC, too important… to her.

Over and over and over again Janet told herself it was her fault.

She was the doctor, she was brought in to save the people that had been hurt, it was the only thing she had to do, and she failed.

Sam was dead, the person that she wanted to protect the most, with the sole exclusion of her daughter, was dead, and she couldn’t do anything to stop it from happening.

Janet wasn’t even looking at her when it happened. She was too busy focusing on her patient, there were many injured, and she needed to bring every single one of them home, so they were the only thing on her mind.

She heard someone call out ‘Carter’, and that was what caught her attention. She looked to her direction, only to see Sam laying on the ground, her eyes open in an unnatural fashion, her head covered in blood, the entire side of her head destroyed.

Janet tried to rush to her, but someone held her back, she didn’t even notice who, two of the marines that were giving her cover, but she couldn’t focus enough to recognize them. She tried to fight against them, until one of them yelled that Sam was dead, and that she needed to focus on her other patients.

Her medical instincts kicked in. She had other lives to save, and she couldn’t think of Sam as any different from the others, at least not yet.

Her work was almost mechanical, but that didn’t make it any less effective. She stabilized the patients, and no one else died.

Sam would have liked this, they brought everyone else back home.

Janet kept her emotions under control, she still had a job to do. She would never let her own feelings get in the way of saving lives, even if she wanted nothing more than to fall apart.

The surgeries took hours, and by the time she was done, everyone else had had time to process what had happened.

She heard that people had cried, while others remained in shock, but now things were quieter, and the emotions had settled. She couldn’t cry now, she couldn’t show her grief now, not without drawing too much attention to herself.

The day had been long, too long already, so she checked her patients one last time and left.

She kept herself calm on the ride home, as she had done while still in the SGC. In reality, she was numb, the pain had been denied for so long that now she couldn’t release it.

She got home to an empty house, one that never felt so empty.

She still wasn’t used not to have Cassie there, but now she was even glad that her daughter wasn’t there. She couldn’t bare to tell her what happened, not yet, she needed time to process it first.

Sam had been like a second mother to Cassie, and surely this would hurt her, although Cassie was so used to dealing with pain and suffering and loss, even at her young age.

It was thinking about what Cassie would feel that finally released Janet’s own emotions.

She had barely given a few steps steps inside when she collapsed, falling to her knees on the living room floor and wailing, she hide her face in her hands and touched it to the ground, pouring out all the pain that she had tried to hold inside.

Sam was dead. _Sam_ was dead. Sam was _dead_.

This couldn’t be happening, this shouldn’t be happening, this was wrong.

And yet....

She knew it was true, she had seen the body, although she didn’t dare to get close.

Sam was dead, and this wasn’t a trick or an effect of alien technology that could be reversed.

This was real, Sam was dead, and there was nothing that could be done about that.

Janet had failed in saving the love of her life, she was a doctor that couldn’t even save someone she loved. What good was even being a doctor if she couldn’t save her…

She didn’t even know what to call Sam. They never had that luxury, of having a name for what they were, a way to call their relationship, because that relationship wasn’t supposed to exist.

They both knew the risks and the sacrifices involved, but they wanted to be together more than they feared losing the life they had. They were together because being apart was unbearable, even if their choice was foolish and dangerous.

And now fate had decided to separate them, once and for all.

The rational part of her brain knew that there was nothing that she could do. Sam died in a fraction of a second, with damage so extensive that not even Tok’ra technology could have saved her, even if they had been there. Sam was dead the moment she was hit, and Janet couldn’t have done anything to prevent her from being hit, and rushing to her afterwards would only have ended with Janet dead too, and possibly her other patients. Focusing on them was the right call, the only one she could possibly have made.

And she still felt guilty.

As if Sam was her responsibility and hers alone, and she failed.

Failed.

Failed.

Failed.

Sam was dead, and she couldn’t stand that, she couldn’t stand the fact that she couldn’t save her.

This was wrong, this was all wrong.

That night, she cried herself to sleep on the living room floor.

\---

They acted as if they owned Sam, it was infuriating.

Janet had to stop herself from yelling at Jack, Teal’c, and Daniel. A part of her knew that her anger came from things much beyond them, even if they were the immediate trigger.

They acted as if they were the sole repositories of Sam’s memory, as if only they were allowed to grief for her, as if she wasn’t important to anyone else except them.

They were her best friends, of course, and they had saved each other’s lives more times than anyone could count, of course they would be suffering because of her death.

But they weren’t the only people who loved Sam, and her death didn’t affect just them, and Janet was getting tired of the fact they acted like that was the case.

They didn’t know about her relationship with Janet, as far as Janet knew. Not because Sam didn’t trust them, or thought that they would judge them, but for more practical reasons. A secret was always best kept if the least amount of people knew about it, and what they didn’t know couldn’t be used against them the next time someone tried to destroy the SGC.

Janet hadn’t told Cassie either, so she didn’t mind that Sam hadn’t shared that with her best friends. It was just the way things were, just the way things had to be. It wasn’t easy, but it was better than the alternative, and being together was worth the sacrifices.

Still, even if they didn’t know, Sam was still Cassie’s godmother, and she still spent most of her free time, the true free time not the hours she wasn’t on the clock but was still studying and researching and working, because she could never really let go, she spent that free time with Janet and Cassie, even more than she did with the other members of SG-1. That meant something, that had to mean something, even if they didn’t know about their relationship.

Sam was an important part of Janet’s life, she had given her her daughter, and saved her daughter’s life on more than one occasion, she was her daughter’s godmother and helped Janet with the incredibly hard task of being a single working mother. That was what they knew, they should respect that she was in at least as much pain as they were, that she felt at least as much guilt over not being able to save Sam.

Janet was in pain too, and no one seemed to allow her that. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair that she couldn’t say how much she loved Sam, it wasn’t fair that she wasn’t even recognized as her closest friend, it wasn’t fair that she wasn’t even allowed to grieve.

Janet was going to visit Cassie to tell her later that day, so they could come back in time for the funeral, and Janet wouldn’t let it stand if they were to treat her as they were treating Janet, even if it wasn’t a conscious choice on their part.

Sam didn’t belong to them, Sam didn’t mean something just to them.

Losing Sam was a blow to everyone who knew her, everyone who knew everything that she had done to protect that planet, and even to everyone who sleep peacefully at home without knowing how close the Earth had come to destruction so many times and how Sam had saved them, not expecting glory or even thanks, just because it was the right thing to do, so she couldn’t do anything else.

Sam was more important than any one person’s grief, any one person’s pain. Losing her was a loss to the entire world.

Janet didn’t want a monopoly on grieving her, all that she wanted was for her feelings to be recognized. She deserved to grieve too, not just them.

Sam wasn’t theirs. Sam didn’t belong to anyone, she was her own person, and affected many lives, and everyone she affected was entitled to be hurting over her death.

But Janet couldn’t say any of that. Not without being looked at with suspicion, maybe not by the surviving members of the SG-1, but by everyone else around them. And she couldn’t do that to Sam, she couldn’t risk tarnishing her reputation like this, even after her death, even if she disagreed with the rules with every fiber of her being, even if she resented that the same air force that was her life couldn’t accept her for who she was, not unless she was able to keep silent and hidden.

No, she couldn’t do that to Sam, so she had to keep the same charade they had had to maintain for the entirety of their relationship.

Which meant that she couldn’t even fight the others for not letting her feel what she was feeling.

They should have known better than to act like this, but they were still deeply affected by pain and loss, so she would try not to judge them, even if their actions affected her so. It wasn’t fair, but they weren’t the reason why things weren’t fair, they were just as much part of this system as she was, and she was sure that, given the chance, they wouldn’t oppose to a change of rules.

No, they weren’t the guilty parties there, even if they were hurting her without knowing. But even acknowledging that didn’t make it easier to accept the way they were acting.

That resentment would have to be just another thing that she would have to bury away deep inside her, just one more thing that she wasn’t allowed to feel, just as she wasn’t allowed to feel for Sam.

Everything about this was wrong, and she didn’t know how to keep going, but she had to.

Falling apart wasn’t an option, so she had to keep going, always moving forward, no matter what.

The world wouldn’t stop for her grief, and they still had a planet to save from ever growing threats, and Sam’s death just made that mission much more difficult.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: descriptions of alternate Sam's death, heavy angst, grief, guilt, lost of emotional control, denial, references to DADT.


	3. Who's left behind

Sam took a deep breath, pressing her hands against the steering wheel. In a few minutes, Cassie’s plane would arrive, and she would have to deal with Cassie’s suffering. She had to be there for her, so she needed to have her own emotions under control.

Cassie was visited by two representatives that told her that her mother had died under circumstances that couldn’t be disclosed. Sam couldn’t understand why they sent people that knew less about the SGC than Cassie did, but she had promised to tell Cassie everything as soon as she got there.

Cassie had demanded answers over the phone even, but Sam was able to remind her that there were things that they could only discuss in person. Cassie was more accepting of this now, of the fact that so much of her own life was a State’s secret, that there were things about herself that she couldn’t talk about freely.

It was a good thing that Janet could take her, all those years ago. Sam couldn’t imagine what Cassie’s life would have been like, if she had been forced to live with someone that didn’t have the clearance to know that Cassie was born and raised in another planet. And that was assuming she would even be allowed to leave the SGC.

A military base was already a complicated environment for a child on the best of conditions, a child without a guardian and that was never allowed to leave or be around other children would have suffered greatly, and that wasn’t even considering the risks of staying at the SGC, with the constant threats and invasions. Or perhaps even worse, perhaps the need to take her away from the gate would be paired with more nefarious purposes, and she would be taken to Area 51 for study, never to be seen again.

Sam might have saved Cassie’s life when she refused to abandon her to die alone as a weapon against her will, but Janet saved her every day after that, and it was only because of that that Cassie had grew into a healthy young woman.

Sam wished that she could have been a greater part of Cassie’s life, but she was already too close as it was. Of course, in a way, Cassie was an excuse for the time she spent with Janet, but Sam only ever spent so much time with her because she adored Cassie, and she wished she could have raised her along with Janet.

It was painful, loving her like a daughter and knowing that she could never be that to her, not officially anyway.

Janet had to be the one to take her, there was no question about that. Janet spent a lot more time at home, and she rarely had a day in which she didn’t manage to go back home. Although she worked long hours, more than a doctor in a hospital would, she stayed most of her time on the planet, and that alone made a difference. After all, even if she couldn’t go home, she could call someone to watch over her, she could talk to Cassie and apologize and promise that she would be back home the following day.

Sam never knew when she would get home. Even if there was a prediction of how long a mission would take, things more often than not didn’t happen according to plan. Sometimes it was something as simple as a delay, sometimes it was something far more serious. It wasn’t too outside the helm of possibility that she would spend over a week away from Earth, often even without communication.

It was one of the things that wouldn’t allow her to have a family, not one in the traditional sense, at least. That wasn’t true just for her, Jack’s son was dead and his wife left, Daniel lost his wife and her child that he wanted to raise in her name, and Teal’c lost his wife and almost never saw his son, since his infancy. But it was more true to her, because being a woman made things more difficult, being a bi woman made things nearly impossible.

Janet had experienced those difficulties too, even more so in some ways. Janet didn’t like mentioning her marriage, the way she forced herself to believe that she could maintain that relationship, how terrified she was when the marriage was over that her ex husband would say something, start rumors that would end her career.

She remembered the first time that Janet told her about that, how she was well into her career before being able to admit, even if just to herself, that she was a lesbian, and that her marriage would never work, because even kissing her husband was a burden.

That they found each other, that they were able to have even a semblance of a family together, was a small miracle, and now Sam had lost that, and there was no chance of she ever getting any of that back.

But she couldn’t think of that now. Cassie had lost her mother, and she was alone in this world now, and there was only a handful of people in the world with whom Cassie could talk about that. Sam had to be there for her, Cassie was the closest thing she would ever have to a daughter, and now she was the only family that Cassie had left, they were in this together.

Sam left the car and went inside, waiting for Cassie to get there.

She promised herself she wouldn’t cry, she would be what Cassie needed of her, she would be strong.

Cassie saw her before Sam had located her. Cassie came running and almost knocked Sam on the floor, launching herself on Sam’s neck.

Sam hugged her back, pressing her even tightly when she felt that Cassie had started crying. She didn’t say a word, at first. She understood the need to just cry, to feel the pain without the interference of rationality. Pain wasn’t rational, and sometimes there were no words that could be said to make someone feel better. Grief had to be felt to pass, and now Cassie wasn’t a child anymore, she understood loss in a different way than she did when she lost her entire planet all those years ago.

Cassie cried without worrying about people around them, and Sam shoot daggers to anyone that dared stare at her. She cried for what felt like hours, and only when she stopped and pushed herself slowly back that Sam talked to her.

“Cassie, how are you feeling?” Sam asked, hating herself for not thinking of something better to say.

“I lost my family for the second time in my life and no one will even tell me what happened, how do you think I’m feeling?” Cassie said, with more hurt than bite.

“I’m sorry, I wanted to go tell you, but they sent someone before I could go. I’ll tell you what happened in the car. I… I was there. When it happened.”

Cassie nodded. “I understand. I should… I should have been here. I can’t believe that my mom died and I was even here to know about that.”

Sam placed a hand on Cassie’s arm. “This isn’t your fault, Cassie. Janet was so proud of you, she couldn’t stop talking about it when you got your acceptance letter. She wouldn’t have wanted you to stay here just to stay with her.”

“She used to tell me that too, but it’s hard to accept it.”

“I know, come on, let’s go to the car,” Sam said, because she wanted to be able to speak freely.

Cassie nodded, and let herself be taken to the car.

Sam was still putting her seatbelt when the first question came.

“Tell me the truth then, how did she die?” Cassie asked, staring at Sam intently.

Sam sighed, starting the car. “We were on a mission, we were ambushed, people got hurt. Coronel O’Neill was… he was dying, and he wasn’t the only one hurt. She came with the backup team, to stabilize them so they could be moved, and she was hit. It was… it was instantaneous, she didn’t suffer, but there was nothing we could do.”

“I knew it, I knew she wouldn't have died here. Please tell me you brought her back.”

Sam couldn’t look at her, wouldn’t dare, but she could feel Cassie’s eyes on her.

“We brought her body back, she’s being held at the SGC, standard quarantine in case of offworld death, but she can be released to you now.”

“To me?” Cassie asked, sounding impossibly lost.

“You’re her next-of-kin, and you are legally an adult.”

“But I don’t even know what to do, I never had to bury anyone here, and we didn’t have next-of-kins and releasing bodies and… and....” Cassie said, her voice failing and her hands shaking.

Sam took her hand to comfort her, not taking her eyes off the road for more than a second. “I know, and you don’t have to worry about that. You shouldn’t worry about that. The only thing you have to do is sign the release, I can arrange the rest.”

“Why is this so complicated? Why do we always have to make things so complicated?”

“I wish I could have an answer to you, but I don’t. All I can say is that I understand how you feel. When I lost my mom, I had to pick the clothes she would be buried in, because my dad didn’t know what she liked, and I remember thinking that was pointless, because my mom was dead, it didn’t matter what she would be dressed in when she was buried, nothing would bring her back.”

“So what did you do?”

“I picked her favorite dress, because that wasn’t the point. These things don’t exist for the person who died, they exist for everyone that was left behind. So maybe the reason we have to do so much is to focus in something other than our pain, or maybe it’s so we can hold on to that person for a little longer, even if only in the problems that that death caused.”

“Back in my world, the whole community got together when someone died. Everyone did something, even if just a little, so no one had to deal with everything alone. Even the children helped, I remember going out with my friends to pick flowers. I think I liked that better.”

“I think I would have liked that better too. But you’re not alone, Cassie. You don’t have to face this alone.”

They were in silence for long minutes, and Sam never noticed how long that drive was before then.

“I always thought that you would be the one to die on another planet,” Cassie finally said, looking out the window.

Sam sighed, but she didn’t have an answer for that, not one that would bring Cassie any peace, because truth be told, she thought the same thing too. Janet was supposed to be safe, or at least safer. Sam thought about her own mortality many times, but she never thought that Janet would be the one to die.

Of course Janet risked her life at times, but it wasn’t the same thing, it wasn’t the same level of risk, nor the same frequency. Janet didn’t test unknown technologies, willingly or not, on herself, Janet didn’t deal with bombs and eruptions and stargates that might be destroyed, Janet didn’t mess around with alien ships.

By all logic, Sam should have been the one to die, she was the one that was always going on dangerous missions and coming seconds away from being killed.

And if she was really honest with herself, the only answer would be that she wished it had been her, but she couldn’t say that to Cassie, because it wouldn’t help Cassie to hear that, so she said nothing, even though she knew it was true.

She wished that she had died in Janet’s place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: mentions of past comphet, grief, loss of family, mild suicidal thoughts.


	4. Who's set aside

Janet asked for the rest of the day off, and the next one as well, and she didn’t have to say why, but she did.

Everyone knew how close Sam was to Cassie, so it wasn’t a surprise that Cassie would want to be there for the funeral. That Janet wanted to go talk to Cassie in person instead of talking to her on the phone or in some other way was harder to explain, it was the problem of those that stayed in the military for too long, especially when death became something so common, but Janet was able to cut that doubt by stating how young Cassie was. She deserved to hear it in person, and she deserved to hear it from someone she knew.

She should have told Cassie already, she knew that. Waiting even a day was cruel, to let her keep going with her life as if nothing had happened, as if things were exactly as they were before. But Janet couldn’t have gone straight away, she wasn’t in control of her emotions, and she couldn’t pour her own emotions onto Cassie. Cassie would have too much of her own pain to deal with.

So she waited until the next day, and planned to go to Cassie’s college in the afternoon. It was a little thing, but she wanted to get there after Cassie’s last class for the day, because it was a Friday, and Cassie would have no other classes until Monday afternoon. It would give her more time to deal with Sam’s death. It wouldn’t be enough time for her to get over it, but it was better than learning about it in the middle of her school week.

In a way, her motives were selfish, and all else was just rationalizations. While Cassie didn’t know, Sam still existed alive in her mind. It didn’t mean anything, but it carried some weight. And yet, it was wrong, and she shouldn’t have kept this up for so long.

Her time off was also a way to remove herself from the situation. She couldn’t stand being in the SGC, and she didn’t want to feel bitter in relation to Jack, Teal’c, and Daniel, despite how much she hated the way they were acting.

She wanted time to feel without being judged, and the drive there gave her that time. She could have flown there, but the drive wasn’t so long, and she wanted to stay alone. Driving was an absent minded action, so it allowed her to think about things.

Once she talked to Cassie, things would become real, or at least concrete in a way she couldn’t think of them as, not yet. Sam was dead, and she had seen the body, but her absence still wasn’t… real. Janet was used to not seeing Sam for even longer periods of time, so that wasn’t a palpable loss, not yet. It would be easy to think that Sam would just come back, she wasn’t really gone, not yet.

But she would be, as soon as Janet talked to Cassie.

As soon as she saw Cassie’s pain, as soon as she had to tell Cassie what happened and how it happened, it would be real.

Janet didn’t want to do it, but she had to, no matter how painful.

She thought about telling Cassie the whole truth many times during the ride, but she couldn’t convince herself to do it. Maybe it was true that Cassie should know, but it would only add to her pain, and it would only add to the many secrets she had to keep.

Cassie had to lie about so much already, and would have to keep lying for her entire life. It wasn’t fair, but neither was being the sole survivor of an entire planet, and being used as a weapon against her will.

Cassie’s life was made of secrets and half-truths and all the things she had to remember to say or not to say. It was cruel, and at one point she had rebelled against that, but she was a bit older now, and had come to accept the way things were, how they had to be.

Janet liked to think that she had done a good job as Cassie’s mother. She dedicated herself to her, and had tried to help her deal with all the emotions that came from her condition. Cassie’s life wasn’t fair, but Janet had done her best to mitigate that.

She wished she could have shielded Cassie from so much more than she did, she wished she could have given Cassie a perfect and normal life, the life that every child on Earth should have, even if so many didn’t. And now, this was just another thing that she couldn’t protect Cassie from.

Janet wondered if one day she would be able to tell Cassie the truth, about how much she and Sam had wished that they could officially be a family. Even if it made no difference now, she still wished Cassie would know about it. Maybe she would see her own memories in a different light once she knew, maybe she would realize that Sam cared about her and wanted to be a bigger part of her life, or maybe it would be a moment in which things that didn't make sense were finally made clear.

For now, the only news that she could give was about Sam’s death, but maybe one day, she would be able to say more.

Not now though, the two things shouldn’t be together.

Dealing with Sam’s death would already be hard enough for Cassie.

\---

Janet felt numb. She had worked so hard to keep herself under control that she couldn’t feel anything now. She had held her crying daughter in her arms, and felt nothing. Maybe this was something that she should be worried about, but she couldn’t worry about it now.

Cassie’s roommate wasn’t there, so they were able to talk freely. She gave Cassie as many details as she would dare, and as many as Cassie would dare to ask for.

Cassie had cried, refused to believe, was furious, but they had time, she could process this in her own way, they didn’t need to leave just yet. Sam’s funeral was set for Sunday, so even if they arrived late on Saturday, they would still be on time.

They could have even stayed the night, but Cassie refused, she wanted to go home, not to keep delaying the inevitable.

The ride home was horrible, for both of them. They couldn’t maintain a conversation, and could barely look at each other.

Janet wondered if somehow Cassie knew that Janet was still hiding something, and if that was part of the reason why Cassie was so distant with her, but she wouldn’t dare to ask. If she acknowledged there was something still in hiding, then there was no going back, Cassie wouldn’t stop until Janet told her the whole truth.

Maybe it was because Cassie knew more about the biggest secret of all governments on Earth than most members of those very governments. Janet and Sam never held back with her, although they didn’t give her many specifics. Cassie was more connected to the System Lords and their conquest of the galaxy than anyone else on Earth could claim to be, with the sole exception of Teal’c. Even the members of the SGC were doing this by their own volition, when she never had a choice, it was part of who she was, down to her DNA and to the society that she spent half of her life in.

Cassie was always good at seeing when Janet was hiding something from her, and she could never let that stand. She always needed to know, she needed to know everything, and she didn’t care if it was something that Janet couldn’t talk about.

Even if it was the case, this was one thing that Janet couldn’t relent on. Maybe after longer had passed, or when Cassie was older, but now wasn’t the right time.

It was unfair, that Janet had had to pretend for so long in her own house, and that she had to keep pretending now with the only living family she still had, but then again, it wasn’t fair that Sam would die like this, it wasn’t fair that Sam’s life was cut so short when there was so much she still had to do. Ever since this started, Sam could never live in an Earth that was in peace, she could never live without the threat of an invasion or even the extinction of all life on the planet. Sam deserved to have known peace, she should have known peace.

But life wasn’t fair, as much as she tried to force it to be, so the lie had to continue, at least for a little longer. And maybe that would make Cassie resent her, but it was how things had to be, at least for now. And there was no point in struggling against that, at least while things remained as they were.

She could tell that Cassie needed more of her than she was giving, but she didn’t know how to be what Cassie needed.

As much as Janet tried, she couldn’t just force herself to act the way that she wanted, she couldn’t force herself to be the help that Cassie needed, she couldn’t force herself to stop thinking about her own pain.

It wasn’t that she didn’t care about Cassie’s wellbeing more than she did her own, that would never be the case, but it was almost a physical impossibility. It felt as if she couldn’t even force her own lungs to breathe, so how could she force a more rational part of her mind to take over?

All the frustrations that Cassie had were her own as well, and yet she couldn’t change her own behavior. Like watching a train crash from inside, every moment bringing her closer to the unavoidable collision and destruction, and yet there was nothing that she could do to leave, or to stop the crash from happening.

It was frustrating, yes, frustrating was the imperative word of grief, how it came without permission and changed behaviors and thoughts, how it demanded undivided attention and punished for every moment that wasn’t dedicated to it, how it hurt and it hurt and it hurt, and yet kept the person lost close by that invisible bond that both restrained and comforted, so as to make it that much harder to let got of it, because letting go of grief meant letting go of the final remains of someone who was loved and missed.

And the most frustrating part of all that process was that she wasn’t allowed to feel any of that. She couldn’t explain to anyone what she was feeling, and couldn’t have her feelings validated.

Perhaps the only person who would truly understand her was Cassie, but Janet couldn’t do that to her. Cassie had to count on her, not the other way around. Her child wasn’t an emotional crutch she could use if things got too difficult. Even if it meant letting those feelings devour her from inside, she wouldn’t burden Cassie with this.

Cassie was her priority now, and always, not her own feelings. Everyone else already acted as if Janet should be over Sam’s death as quickly as possible, so that was what she would try to do, no matter how painful it was.

Forcing herself to pass through the pain and get out on the other side as quickly as possible would be far from easy, but it was a necessity.

Janet promised herself that she would do better, that she would be better, that she would find a way to become what Cassie needed of her now.

And maybe that was just another way of avoiding her own feelings, but it was all that she had to hold on now, all that she had to keep herself afloat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: grief, closeted relationship


	5. Life as usual

Things went back to normal surprisingly quickly, far quicker than they had any right to be.

The galaxy refused to stop just because Janet had died, and the world continued to spin.

It was wrong, horribly wrong, that things would settle themselves on the new status quo so easily, as if Janet was replaceable, as if her death was nothing more than a footnote in the history of the SGC.

Janet had touched the lives of every single person there, she had saved the lives of most of them more times than she could count, and she had to do that at times dealing with threats she had no way of preparing for. Technology so beyond what they had that they didn’t even have a way of detecting what was wrong, let alone actually countering what was done.

Janet had been a spectacular doctor, and much of what they had accomplished couldn’t have been done without her.

And now things just… kept going. As if that meant nothing, as if Janet’s death meant nothing.

People were sad, people cried, very few people managed to keep dry eyes at her funeral, and yet, things were already back to normal, as if grief was time contained and was buried away as soon as Janet was.

It couldn’t be like this for Sam, even if everything around her demanded that it was.

The thing was, her own feelings were battling again practical reality.

Things could never be calm at the SGC, so a crisis came, as they always did, always Earth shattering, always requiring her immediate attention.

A crisis came, and then another, and another, and another.

There was always so much happening at once, so much she had to do, that at times, she could forget.

Sam would never mean to, it would just happen. She would be working on some new project, or trying to decipher a new piece of technology, or maybe being shot at by whichever enemies decided that week that they wanted her kind dead. She would be doing something important, that required all of her attention, and Janet would just slip from her mind, and for a few minutes, sometimes even hours, Sam would forget that she was dead.

And then everything would come crashing back, and it would be so much worse.

She felt guilty every time, guilty for acting like the others, for letting her work take so much of her mind. Perhaps she shouldn’t, Janet certainly never guilted her for focusing on her work, and it made it easier to hide from everyone else that something was wrong, but still, she felt unbelievably guilty.

Janet was too important to be forgotten, Sam didn’t want to forget about her, not even for a few moments at a time.

She was sure that, if their places had been reversed, Janet wouldn’t have forgotten her. Janet was always more in touch with her own emotions, she was always better at dealing with things like this. Sam was sure that she would have felt pain, but wouldn’t have let it consume her like Sam did, and above all else, she wouldn’t be burying herself in her work the way Sam was doing.

Sometimes, Sam would think about that, about the way Janet would have reacted in her place. It was a kind of lifeline. Janet was no longer there to support her, so Sam would draw strength in knowing that Janet would have found a better way of dealing with this kind of feelings.

Of course, she would never know if that was true, but in her mind it was unquestionable, and she would never be proven wrong.

She would think about Janet, so calm and level-headed, and Sam would try to be more like her.

\---

Cassie didn’t want to be in the house, but she didn’t want to sell it either.

Sam had helped her with all the complicated financial issues that always come with a death. Bills that need to be paid, debts that need to be settled, and deciding what to do with everything that was left.

Janet’s funeral was paid for by the Air Force, so that was one less thing to worry about. The mortgage on her house had also recently been paid, which was one small grace, as that was often one of the biggest problem with a death. All in all, Janet didn’t have many possessions, but she also barely had any debt, aside from paying for Cassie’s college, so what was left, along with the SGC’s rather generous pension plan for surviving family (it was one of those benefits that had to be better for them than any other branch of the armed forces, with a mortality rate bigger than any other war, they need some tempting advantages other than saving the world on a weekly basis), meant that Cassie wouldn’t have to worry about money for long enough to settle herself.

However, even paid for, the house was still a problem.

Cassie couldn’t move back in, not while she was still in college, and she probably wouldn’t after she graduated. There weren’t many things to do there, aside from working at the SGC, and Sam doubted that Cassie would ever want that. Even if the program had given Cassie her life, it had also taken her mother, and was arguably indirectly responsible for the destruction of her planet.

Still, this was the house she grew up in, and Cassie wasn’t willing to give it up. It was a connection to her mother, one that was important to her, even if she didn’t have any use for it now.

The problem was, Cassie also didn’t want strangers living in her mother’s house. And yet, keeping a house empty was more trouble than it was worth, and it posed a whole new set of complications.

Which was why Sam suggested that she be the one to rent it.

It wasn’t something she thought about, at first, and she wasn’t entirely sure it was healthy, but it was a solution to the problem of what to do with the house, and it meant that they didn’t have to get rid of all of Janet’s things.

It was also a way to keep closer to her.

Perhaps it was a little morbid, moving into her dead lover’s house, but it made her think of all the times they talked about wanting to move in together some day, when it was allowed, or maybe even after retirement.

Sam remembered joking one time that if the stargate program went public, especially after a more blazen mission where SG-1 saved Earth at the last second, then they would probably even able to get married, since it wasn’t as if anyone would have the guts to go against the people that saved the planet from alien invasion multiple times, let alone court martial them, at least not if they had the public eye to worry about.

It wasn’t strictly true, of course. It wouldn’t be the first time that the military did something irrational and unfair that turned into a PR nightmare, but since there wasn’t actually much of a chance of the general public getting to know about what they did, then there was no harm in dreaming about that.

Cassie refused to accept that Sam rented the house, she considered Sam family, and she didn’t actually need any more money. She was glad to have Sam live at the house, but refused to get anything in return for it, other than Sam making sure that the house would stay cared for. And besides, she pointed, if Sam lived there, Cassie would have a place to stay when she came visit.

So Sam moved into Janet’s house, and kept most of Janet’s things as they were. Sam herself didn’t have much in the way of possessions she actually cared about, and most of those were related to work anyway.

It was scary how easy she settled herself there, as if she was always meant to live there. It only made her hurt even more, because she wanted to have shared this life with Janet, not get the scraps once Janet was no longer there.

Sam liked to pretend that this was the life that she always dreamed of having, that Janet was just on a late shift and would be home later, maybe after Sam was already asleep. She could almost pretend that this was simply an issue of their shifts not matching, but that they would have more time for each other eventually.

She shouldn’t be doing this, and was keenly aware of that. Grief does strange things with people, and healing after a death isn’t a linear process. None of that changed the fact that she was making things worse for herself, but she still couldn’t let go.

That was the insidious nature of grief, how it could penetrate on every aspect of life and refuse to let go. Even as her work claimed more and more of her attention, it could still find a place to grow and fester, taking a hold of her heart and devouring her from the inside.

At times, she could work and go about things as if nothing happened, sometimes she could almost begin to accept that she would never see Janet again, and sometimes it would still crush her just as when it happened.

Sometimes, she could almost believe that she was starting to heal, that things would start to get better, and that one day she would be able to think about Janet without suffering so greatly.

Then other days would come, the majority of days even, in which she would be sure that this was it, that this was what the rest of her life looked like. And it was a terrifying concept, that she would never be as happy as she had been next to Janet.

And she couldn’t accept that, she couldn’t accept that this was all that were to it.

Sam could do her work, very well even. She knew how important her work was, and she always cared about it, passionately. It wasn’t just about her desire to keep others safe, although there was that, of course. There was also the matter of her love of science.

Because the truth was that she loved her work, deeply, and she couldn’t imagine herself doing anything else. It was part of the reason they even had to hide, because neither one of them would have wanted to leave their work. She loved her work, but it could no longer bring her the joy that it always did.

She still loved it, she would still feel the thrill when one of her more wild theories worked, or when she got a chance to study a particularly interesting piece of alien technology, but it wasn’t as before.

She couldn’t feel any joy that could completely cut through the pain. And as the weeks passed by, things became more and more unbearable.

She couldn’t stand that anymore, she couldn’t stand the thought of never seeing Janet again. She needed Janet back, even though she knew it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible, Janet was dead, but Sam still needed her.

Janet was dead, she wasn’t going to come back, it was pointless to wish that she would return to Sam, because things didn’t work like that.

She would never see Janet again, and that thought was unbearable.

She wished more than anything that there was a way to fix it, any way, she would do anything to have Janet back, even if she could only see her one last time.

It wouldn’t happen, she knew it wouldn’t happen, so she tried to force the thought out of her mind. The pain would never let go of her for as long as she held onto that impossible hope.

Her Janet was gone, dead and buried, and she was never coming back.

And the sooner Sam would come to accept that, the sooner she would be able to move on with her life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms, implied DADT.


	6. Life goes on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, academic commitments were the only thing on my mind.

Janet was trying so hard to forget.

She was burying herself in her work, trying to forget.

It wasn’t as if she wanted to stop caring about Sam, she would never be able to stop caring about her, nor would she want to.

But she couldn’t keep carrying on with her life if she kept thinking of Sam at all times, and she needed to keep going, Cassie deserved as much.

It would be easier to give herself over to her work, to focus on what she had power over, than it was to dwell on what she couldn’t avoid.

Janet didn’t believe she would ever get over the guilt of not having been able to protect Sam, of not having been able to save her life as she was supposed to be.

Janet’s only job was to keep everyone alive and well, she had to fix them, no matter what happened.

Janet had lost many patients during her time with the SGC, more than all the patients that she had lost before combined. Every single person that she had failed to save, she carried with her, it had always been like this, and the greater numbers at the SGC wouldn’t change that. They were all her patients, and she cared about them all.

But Sam was different, of course Sam was different. Sam had to be different.

There was a reason why doctors weren’t supposed to treat family members, especially on life and death situations. It was impossible to think objectively, it was impossible not to be too attached.

And in Janet’s case, it was even worse, because she had to pretend that Sam was no different from everyone else, from all the patients she had already lost.

Sam was her friend, of course, but she was friendly with other people who had died offworld. It was dangerous getting close to anyone at the SGC, odds were at least a few of your friends would die. And although Janet had felt the deaths of her other friends, she had carried on with her life, so she had to do the same now, she couldn’t show that Sam’s death had affected her differently.

And to do that, she couldn’t feel anything about Sam’s death at all.

And to make sure that she wouldn’t feel anything about Sam’s death, she had to forget anything about that, and the only way to do it was to have no life outside of work.

The only exception was Cassie, she would never cut Cassie off. Instead, every time that she would talk to Cassie, Janet would put on a mask, and pretend that everything was fine.

She could tell how frustrated Cassie was with that, how Cassie wanted her to show how much she was hurting, but Janet was still the mother and Cassie was still the child, and this was how things had to be.

Deep down, Janet knew how many of her decisions were unhealthy. She knew that they would have negative consequences, but she still couldn’t stop herself.

At times, it was like she was watching herself from afar, angry at her own decisions, yelling and begging herself to do things differently.

That wasn’t a good sign, but she already knew that her reaction to Sam’s death was damaging to herself. It was just that recognizing that her behavior was unhealthy and actually doing something to stop it were two very different things.

So she tried to forget, as if forgetting would solve all her problems, even though she knew it wouldn’t.

If she let herself think about Sam, she would find herself hoping that somehow Sam would come back, that she would just walk through the gate as if nothing had happened, or maybe telling a fantastical story about how her death was actually forged, and she had been kept somewhere for all that time.

It wouldn’t happen, she knew it wouldn’t happen, but it was hard not to hope beyond hope that Sam was fine, that she was well somewhere, that this wasn’t real.

It wouldn’t be the first time that they believed a member of the SG-1 was dead only to learn that this was all part of a scheme by one of their enemies or a mistake, but of course those times there wasn’t a body, there wasn’t actual confirmation.

Janet saw Sam’s body, and that was what made it so hard to deny that this had happened, but the mind was a wonderful thing, and it could come up with impossible scenarios to challenge what she had seen.

Janet desperately wanted to get over Sam’s death. She wanted her life to carry on, because there was no other choice, and it was frustrating that she couldn’t make things happen as she wanted them to.

So she wanted to forget, Janet needed to forget, not because Sam wasn’t important to her, but exactly because she was.

Sam was the great love of her life, and Janet saw no way of getting over her death.

As long as Sam was in her mind, Janet wouldn’t be able to move on, and she had no way of getting Sam out of her mind.

Janet saw no way out of this situation, she didn’t know how to get her life back.

Sam wouldn’t want her to suffer like this, but Janet couldn’t avoid it. Perhaps Sam would have dealt with things better, if their situations had been reversed. Sam had dealt with so much loss already, and she always kept strong. She would cry, of course, but she would keep her head high, and she wouldn’t let this keep her from what needed to be done.

Janet wished that she could be more like Sam, that she could have a better control of her own emotions. It was just another one of the many reasons why she wished that Sam could be there with her, so that she would teach her how to deal with the pain.

She would never see Sam again, it wasn’t possible, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

She hated everything about this situation. She hated how weak she felt over her own inability to get over the pain. She hated the fact that she could see no solution to her problems.

Most of the time, she left numb and nothing more, but at times she would give herself over to the desperation. It was a torturous cycle that she couldn’t escape, didn’t know how.

Janet needed help, she needed someone she could talk to, but there was no one to fill in that role for her.

She didn’t have any friends she was close enough to share what was happening, especially because it was impossible to even describe Sam without talking about all of her heroics, all that she had done for that and many other planets.

Perhaps once Cassie was older, she could talk to her, but even that was far from being an ideal situation.

Truth be told, Sam was the only person she could really talk to openly, without any need of holding back, which was just another reason why Sam’s death hit her so hard.

Sam was her great love, of course, but she was also her best friend, and her only confidant.

Now Janet was alone, in the sense of not having someone that could support her. The only lasting relationship she still had was one that she was the one to provide care. She needed to have more than just her daughter, but she didn’t, and she kept pushing away even the people she was closer to at the SGC.

Everything about this was wrong, and she didn’t know how she could make things right.

\---

Cassie wanted to drop out of college, but Janet was able to convince her to stay there.

Janet knew that Sam’s death would hurt Cassie, but she hadn’t expected that things would be so bad. She wondered if some of Cassie’s reactions were caused by Janet’s own feelings, as a response to her mother’s actions. Cassie had always been an empathic person, which was one more reason that Janet wanted to keep herself under control near her.

There was no point in wondering about that, all that she could do was try to support her daughter, even if Janet didn’t have any support herself.

Janet suspected that Cassie wanted to drop out not because of her own feelings in relation to Sam’s death, but because she was worried about her mother. Cassie was such a sweet girl, she always cared about Janet, always tried to help her, even though it wasn’t her role as a daughter.

So, Janet did everything that she could to convince Cassie that she should continue her studies, that leaving wouldn’t make her feel better.

Reluctantly, Cassie accepted to go back. Janet rushed to reassure Cassie that she would be fine by herself, that she didn’t need Cassie to stay at home to take care of her, which tipped the scales in favor of her return to college.

It was for the best. Of course Janet would have loved to have kept her daughter close for longer, but she wanted what was best for Cassie, not what would be best for Janet. It was a big part of being a parent, thinking about her child’s needs before her own.

It wasn’t much, but it was something that she could do for Cassie, sending her away to continue to pursue her dreams, even if it pained Janet.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been too bad if Cassie had taken some time off, but Janet was already afraid of the way that she had stayed trapped by her own grief, and she didn’t want that for Cassie. Janet was terrified that, if Cassie stopped, even if just for a semester, she would become trapped like Janet was now.

So Janet managed to convince Cassie to go back, even if Cassie continued to come visit her every weekend, which she didn’t use to do before what happened to Sam.

Janet wasn’t happy about that, she didn’t want Cassie to worry about her like this, and it was obvious that this was what was happening.

Janet wondered how broken she really was, that even her daughter could tell that she needed help, but she still didn’t want to accept help from Cassie. Perhaps it was irrational of her, but she feared being a burden to her daughter, Cassie already had to deal with too much in her life, and Janet didn’t want to add to that, under no circumstances.

She couldn’t stop Cassie from coming back home during the weekends, and she liked having her daughter around. However, whenever Cassie was home, she would do her best to keep up her mask for longer, she would hide her feelings even deeper than she already did at her work. It was just another of her unhealthy behaviors, but she truly believed that this was what was best for Cassie.

The way that things were, Janet didn’t know how to escape this situation, but she desperately wanted to. She would have accepted any solution, as long as it allowed her to return to the way she was, as long as it allowed her to be the mother that Cassie needed.

But she didn’t have a solution, and she couldn’t find one.

It was too much, it was all too much, and she didn’t know how long she could keep going with things like this.

Janet so desperately wanted to forget everything, she wanted to take her pain away and carry on.

She held onto that hope, that if she dedicated herself to other things, she could take her mind off Sam, and with that she could continue going. It wasn’t much, but it was all that she had.

It was cruel, even, to want to forget about Sam, more cruel to herself than anything else, but she didn’t know how to live a life without Sam, so forgetting about her was the only way she could think of carrying on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms


	7. Alternate realities

Janet was dead. Her Janet was dead. Sam tried not to make that distinction.

Her Janet wasn’t the only Janet that existed, but she was the only Janet that Sam loved, so the fact that there were others shouldn’t matter.

The problems started one day, when she was looking for a report.

Sam needed some information, and while she was searching for it, she found a past mission report. It wasn’t anything too significant, and perhaps in another moment she wouldn’t have thought anything of it, just dismissed the report as not the one that she was looking for.

But she had been thinking about Janet that day, and about how, in the many parallel universes that existed, there were so many versions of Janet that were still alive and well.

That thought started as nothing more than a way of trying to cope with what happened, of trying to convince herself that even if her Janet no longer existed, countless others did, and that would have to be enough. And perhaps it would have stayed like this, if not for that fateful report.

It talked about the quantum mirror, and it made Sam think about all the times that they had had contact with another reality, close or distant to their own.

From the ones that they knew, none would have her Janet, perhaps one close, but not the one that had been with her for years, not the one that she could always count on, and that knew Sam better than any other person.

However, Sam was a physicist, she knew how the parallel universes worked, or at least had a pretty good notion about it. She knew how some had only the smallest variations from others, and so, that there had to be one out there that was almost exactly like her own, in all but one key element.

Somewhere out there, there was a universe like her own, except in that one Janet was still alive.

Sam had tried not to think about it in those exact terms, because it was one thing to take comfort in the existence of Janet in some form, and another quite different to imagine a Janet exactly like the one that she knew, still alive but completely out of reach.

It would do her no good to think about that, and it would only make her suffer even more.

It was perhaps a good thing that they no longer had the quantum mirror, because otherwise it would be hard not to be tempted into using it, even though she knew how low the chances of finding a Janet exactly like the one she had known were.

Because that was the thing about being aware of the existence of multiple universes, she knew that for every person who was alike someone in her own universe, there were many more universes in which that person was completely different.

Somewhere out there, there were Janets that never went to med school, that never adopted Cassie, that never got divorced, that never joined that SGC, that never lived into adulthood. The possibilities were endless, and some universes even had to have a Janet that Sam wouldn’t get along with.

It was too big of a risk for something that would probably never going to work, like looking for a specific needle in a needle factory.

Especially because, from what they knew so far, it was easier to communicate with universes close, but not too close for their own. There wasn’t a single report of contact with a reality that only had a close point of divergence, aside from the one that had been artificially created.

Which was the reality that Daniel came from, and that was just something too uncomfortable to think about, which was why they had all chosen to ignore the fact that the Daniel they knew died and was replaced by his counterpart from an alternate pocket universe. It was easier to pretend that that death too hadn’t been permanent, like so many others before. But it had, and the Daniel she had known the longest wasn’t the same one that she had met on that first trip to Abydoss all those years ago. Which was a headache and a half to think about.

And still, it was… proof of concept, so to speak. The Daniel that they knew had died and been replaced with his alternate universe counterpart, from a universe that had separated from theirs only hours before, and the change wasn’t even noticeable, to the point that they could pretend it never happened, and most people who knew him before the incident never even came to know about what had happened.

Even though it was only possible because it was an artificially created universe, if it happened to Daniel, it could happen to Janet. At least in the sense that it wasn’t entirely impossible.

Of course, a pocket alternate universe and naturally occuring parallels universes weren’t the same thing. There were several logistical concerns to keep in mind, starting with the very obvious problem of finding a good candidate universe from which to take someone when it wasn’t so conveniently connected to the target universe.

Except she wasn’t thinking about that, wouldn’t think about that, so she didn’t need to keep anything in mind.

It would do no good to even consider the possibility, let alone ponder on the logistics of it, because Sam wasn’t going to go after an alternate version of Janet.

Even if she were to consider for a single moment that it was possible to find the perfect universe, say, one that separated from hers the moment before Janet’s death, what would she do with that?

She would never be able to bring Janet to her own universe, there would be too many questions that she couldn’t answer, not to mention several higher ups that wouldn’t allow someone from another universe to walk around freely. And even if she were to ignore all of that, Janet would have no reason to abandon her own universe in favor of Sam’s, especially because she would never abandon Cassie for no one, not even Sam, nor would Sam expect her to.

No, there was no point in even entertaining the idea, because nothing could ever come of it, and the sooner she realized that, the sooner she could move on with her life.

The problem was, once a tragedy being changed became possible in her mind, it was hard to set that thought aside, even if she knew that possible still meant highly unlikely.

Sam was known for making even the impossible possible, and it wouldn’t be the first time that she challenged her own expectations and managed to find a solution to a problem that at first glance would seen to even violate the known laws of physics.

And this time, perhaps the stakes were even higher, because fighting for one specific beloved person always held more power than fighting for the whole of humanity generically considered.

Could she make this work? The question itself had a double meaning, did she have the capability of making the physics work in her favor, and would she be capable of going through with it? Those were very different questions, and they could even have different answers, although she wasn’t perfectly sure of that.

The ethics of the situation were probably more complicated than the physics.

Could Sam make the technology work? No, not with what they had on Earth. Maybe, if she had the time to develop their own tools to visiting other universes, probably using the gate as a jumping point. Yes, if a sample of the technology that already existed from other species was found and she had a chance of studying it.

Could Sam disrupt the life of Janet by announcing her presence? No, Janet deserved better than to have to deal with the decision of how to react to an invite to change universes. Maybe, if she could find a candidate that was just right. Yes, if Janet’s life on her own universe was so full of pain that her only chance at happiness was moving away.

Could Sam face the risks to her own reality that would certainly come from opening it up to connect with another one?

That was a question she couldn’t answer, and one that she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to.

Sometimes, it was best not to know some things about one’s self, not until they became needed and relevant. The hard choices were often the ones that one wouldn’t want that they were capable of choosing until the moment in which it became impossible to deny that that was the choice they were willing to take.

She shouldn’t be thinking of such things, she shouldn’t even be thinking of such things. Nothing good would come of continuing to ponder over a dilemma that wasn’t real, because this wasn’t a choice presented to her, and it would never be.

Sam would never find a piece of technology that worked exactly the way she would need it to work in order to communicate with an universe that met to her specific needs.

Even if she found the technology, she wouldn’t be able to freely study it, let alone use it, because it would stay at the SGC, or maybe be moved to Area 51, and then even if she had any access to it, it would be supervised to the point that she wouldn’t be able to put it to work in general, let alone make it work the way she wanted.

Even if she could use that technology, she would never be able to find the universe that met her exact specifications, as there were countless different realities, most significantly different from hers, and she wasn’t willing to settle on one that wasn’t exactly what she needed.

Even if she could find a perfect universe, Janet would never come back with her, because Janet would have a daughter and friends and a mission and an universe to save, just as Sam had there, and just as Sam wouldn’t abandon her reality to live in another that Janet hadn’t died, Janet would never abandon her hope just because she was in love.

And even if she could convince Janet to come to her universe, Sam wouldn’t have what to do with her, because Janet wouldn’t be allowed to do anything, having too much information to be left free, but not being from that universe she wouldn’t be seen as trustworthy, and then wouldn’t be given the chance of continuing with her mission, for the simple fact that she came from somewhere else.

Too many things could go wrong, far more than the ones that could go right, so there was no use in even considering that idea.

Sam should never have thought about the quantum mirror in the first place, in fact, her first mistake was imagining the lives that the alternate versions of Janet must have been living, because it was far too easy for one thing to turn into another, and soon an almost childish desire to have Janet back could turn into a very real and very careless plan that could only end in tragedy.

Janet was dead. No amount of considering other realities would ever change the fact that the Janet she loved had died brutally and pointlessly, and that Sam wasn’t able to keep her safe.

Even if she found a Janet that didn’t die, even if she found one Janet that didn’t die at that exact instant that Janet did, it would still not be her Janet, it would still not be the same thing, and it would still not change the fact that she had failed Janet.

Nothing could change the past, and thinking of parallel universes was just her way of holding on to the hope that she could alter that moment.

So Sam had to tell herself, over and over again, that she would not search for the technology, she would not go after a way of finding another Janet that was still alive.

The alternate realities meant nothing to her, because she would stay in her own, and she wouldn’t go chasing impossible dreams and things that weren’t meant to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: unhealthy coping mechanisms, spoilers for Stargate Audiobook Gift of the Gods.


	8. Alternate selves

Janet couldn’t forget, as much as she tried.

Sam was too important part of her life, and her presence at the SGC was still almost tangible.

Sam was the soul of the program, the one who made everything work, and all that existed there existed because of her, so it was impossible not to be reminded of her.

And it was impossible to remember her and not feel pain, but Janet was working on that.

Janet wanted to remember Sam, and she wanted to be able to think of all the good things associated with Sam, not that one painful moment that ruined it all.

Janet wanted to remember Sam’s smile, and the way she got so excited when she talked about science that sometimes she didn’t even notice that her explanations were flying over people’s heads, and the cute way she would talk to her plants but only when she thought that no one was looking.

There were so many things that she loved and admired about Sam, and Janet wanted to be able to remember about those things, remember all the good moments, without seeing Sam’s lifeless body.

Sam had been taken away from her, for good, but that didn’t meant that all the memories of her had to be tainted. No one could take the memories away from her, so she shouldn’t willingly let go of them.

Janet had tried to forget, because the pain was too much for her to handle, and because she needed to keep going with her life.

However, fighting the pain only made her numb to everything, and that was better and worse, because the pain would stop for a while, but despair always managed to break through, and every time it did, it threatened to break her apart.

Now, she realized that ignoring the pain, and forgetting about Sam in order to ignore her death, was far from what she needed to do.

The way to healing was through the pain, accepting what had happened and moving on. It wouldn’t be easy, but she had to try, because she needed to be able to think about Sam without feeling that emptiness in her chest.

It was a work in process, but Janet had been trying to focus on the good memories she had of Sam.

Janet couldn’t remember why she was looking at her medical files. She was looking for something that not this, but whatever she was looking for wasn’t an emergency, and it slipped out of her mind as soon as she landed on that file.

Sam’s file.

Except it wasn’t.

It was filed as Alternate Universe Carter, Samantha. It wasn’t as if Janet had forgotten about that visit, but the existence of alternate universes hadn’t been on Janet’s mind.

Janet still remembered her own shock in seeing another Sam in front of her, looking just slightly off, but acting in a completely wrong way. Just a glance was enough to tell her that this wasn’t her Sam, even before hearing the whole explanation and learning what exactly was happening there.

And as that alternate Sam talked about her life, it was clear how different she was from the Sam in that universe.

That Sam wasn’t in the Air Force, and that alone meant a huge change, as her Sam was defined by her many years of military life, of being a highly competent pilot and a brilliant soldier who was also a woman in a man’s world. And that Sam was married to Jack, and there was too much there to unpack, but even the fact that she was married was already a huge difference.

However, although she was looking at that Sam’s file and thinking about the moment that she met her, Janet wasn’t thinking about that Sam, not exactly.

Janet was thinking about what that meant.

They had found out about the existence of parallel universes many years ago, or rather, found proof of it, as Sam told them all that this was already a strong scientific theory. And just as they found that those other universes existed, they also learned that travelling between them was possible. At the time, that knowledge had been buried in the fear of the impending attack on Earth, and by the time another contact was made, they had gotten used to that idea.

Still, now Janet caught herself thinking about those alternate universes, and the people that existed in them.

From what Sam had explained, countless universes existed, some closer, and some more distant from their own.

It made Janet wonder if, somewhere out there, there was a place in which her Sam was still alive.

Well, not _her_ Sam, not exactly anyway. Her Sam was buried, in a grave that Janet hadn’t been able to bring herself to visit since the burial day. Nothing could change the fact that that Sam was dead, and nothing would ever bring her back.

But maybe there was one like her, somewhere.

It wouldn’t be the same thing, not at all. It wouldn’t change her guilt over not being able to save Sam, and it wouldn’t change the fact that the life of the woman she loved had been cut short.

However, it was somewhat comforting.

If the number of parallel universes was really countless, then perhaps there was one in which Janet didn’t fail, in which she was able to save Sam, or in which Sam’s life was never at risk, but the Sam that lived on would be like her Sam.

A Sam that loved her like her Sam had.

She wasn’t sure how probable that was. Janet understood a little of what Sam had explained about… well, everything that Sam loved, which seemed to include multiple branches of science. Janet would always listen closely, especially because some of that would influence her own job as a doctor, but also because she loved to hear Sam talk about everything that she was passionate about.

However, Janet was still a medical doctor, and not a physicist, so there were things that she didn’t understand about that.

Still, she knew enough to convince herself that it was true, that a parallel universe existed in which she and Sam were in a relationship, and Sam hadn’t died on that mission.

She would never be able to have contact with that universe, of course. For starters, Janet didn’t have the technology necessary to do that, and worse, the SGC itself didn’t have that. So from a technical point of view, it was out of the question.

And not only that, but Janet wouldn’t have the necessary skill set to create the technology, and probably not even to operate it, if she found it.

Sam would be much better at that, of course.

There had never been a problem to which Sam wasn’t able to find or invent a solution, she was just brilliant like that. Sam always made the impossible possible if it meant saving lives, and it was one of the many things that Janet admired about her.

If Sam had been the one in her place, Janet was sure that she would already have been able to think of a solution. It was just the way she was, Sam was the best that humanity had to offer.

But Sam wasn’t there, and that was exactly the problem, so it would do Janet no good to keep imagining how Sam would be able to solve everything if she were there, even if…

Well, if Sam still existed somewhere else, then maybe that meant that Sam could come back for her.

Not her Sam, not exactly, but one that was close enough, perhaps even one that had lost her Janet the same way that Janet had lost her Sam.

It wouldn’t be the same thing, but it would still be the closest thing she could ever get to seeing Sam again, and that alone made the fantasy so tempting.

And the fact that it was tempting made that fantasy dangerous, because Janet could get lost in that. She would keep expecting Sam to come back and rescue her, instead of fixing her own life, like she knew that she had to.

So, she needed to close that door, she couldn’t think about the parallel universes, and all of the Sams that could exist in them. She couldn’t think of all the selves, her own and Sam’s, that existed somewhere that she couldn’t reach.

Although imagining Sam living, well and happy, even if away from Janet, even if somewhere that Janet could never reach her, was a comforting thought, it was one that Janet couldn’t linger on, not if she wanted to move on with her life, and she desperately needed to move on, she needed things to go back to normal, because she couldn’t stand the thought of keep going as she was.

Janet wanted to one day live her life without the pain of Sam’s death, and for that she needed to accept that death, and imagining other universes in which that death didn’t occur was the opposite of acceptance.

Janet closed the alternate universe Sam’s file, as if with that motion she could close down her own thoughts, and forget that she had even considered that possibility.

She couldn’t give herself to dreaming and hoping beyond hope, because that would be just as bad as wanting to forget, it would be just as bad as ignoring her own feelings and her pain, and trying to pretend that things were exactly as they were before.

As hard as it was, as painful as it was, Janet had to accept that Sam’s death had happened, and that it was final.

Janet would never see Sam again, so she shouldn’t imagine that she would. All that she would ever have of Sam were her memories of their time together, and she could only hope that one day she would be able to look back at those memories with fondness, and not suffering.

Things would never go back to the way that they were, and they would never come even close to it, but they didn’t have to be as bad as they were now.

Janet would never be as happy as she had been with Sam, and she would never have the happy ending that they had planned for themselves, but that didn’t mean that she could only be miserable for the rest of her life, and Sam wouldn’t have wanted Janet to be miserable without her.

She would heal, if for no other reason than because Sam would have wanted her to, and because Cassie needed her to. She would find a way to live her life as well as she could, and she wouldn’t allow herself to be devoured by the pain and the suffering anymore.

The alternate selves that existed somewhere else didn’t matter, because she couldn’t reach them, so they might as well not exist.

Janet wouldn’t get a second chance with Sam, so she shouldn’t hope for that chance. If she were to have another chance at happiness, it would have to be without Sam, and yet Janet wanted to believe that it was possible. She still had her daughter, and her work. Maybe it could be enough, it would have to be enough.

Janet turned back to her notes, trying to remember what she was supposed to be looking for. She still had a job to do, and even if it wasn’t urgent, or probably even that important, it was something that she could do to distract herself.

This was her universe, the only one that she would ever know, and in it, Sam no longer existed, and that couldn’t be changed by appealing to another universe.

This was all that Janet had, all she had to work with, and she needed to rebuild her life, all the while not letting others around her realize that this was what she was doing.

It was the only way that Janet had of truly moving forward, and it was the path that she would have to take.


	9. Falling to temptation

Sam’s musings about alternate realities would have stayed as just that, if not for that fateful mission.

One moment changed everything, one moment that taught her more about herself than anything else had before.

It was a split second decision, no time to second guess her instincts, no time to ponder on the likely disastrous consequences.

One split second decision was all it took for Sam to commit treason, and there was no going back.

It was an ordinary mission, the signs of civilization long since abandoned, and the planet itself was peaceful.

That wasn’t reason alone to let their guard down, but as their survey went on, both she and Daniel ended up following their own paths, seeking things that would make this mission worth the trip.

Sam was better at taking care of herself than Daniel, so Jack and Teal’c were keeping a closer eye on him than her. She didn’t mind, they were close enough if she needed backup, and she could even see them out of the corner of her eye.

Normally, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with that scenario, but perhaps in this case, if she had had any more supervision, maybe she wouldn’t have done what she did.

Sam had seen the device embedded on the wall, and the inscriptions surrounding it made it clear what the device was supposed to do. Even without a translation of the words, the illustrations clearly depicted it being used to open a door to another version of the same place.

She couldn’t know for sure that it was a way of travelling to another universe, but all the signs pointed to that, and if she could translate the inscription, perhaps she could find a way to make it work.

It wasn’t a rational decision that made her take the device and put it on her bag, and then photograph the wall so that she could try to decipher what was written.

Finding that device was like fate, if she were to believe in such things. Just a few days prior she had been thinking about alternate universes, and now a device that could be used to access just that had landed on her hands. It was too good of an opportunity to pass on, even if she knew it was wrong, even if she knew that just taking it was enough to cost her everything, her career, her freedom, her life.

The device was small enough to carry on one hand, only a bit bigger than her palm and with a kind of oval shape. It was black and smooth to the touch, but she could see a faint light leaving some points, despite not being able to identify any buttons or controls. It was light, much lighter than she would have imagined by looking at it. Altogether, it seemed too small and unimpressive to do what the walls claimed it could do, but it wouldn’t be the first time that they had encountered something that looked simple and harmless, and was more advanced than anything they had on Earth.

It was easy to conceal, but despite the minimum weight, Sam felt as if she was carrying a large burden.

She knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t force herself to bring the device up, mention it as if she had just forgotten about it. If it did what she thought it did, then it would have its destruction ordered before they even had a chance to study it, and then she might lose her only chance without even knowing if it would work.

If it didn’t work, then no harm would be done, and she could destroy the device and move on, her wrongdoings known just to herself, a guilt she would have to bear.

However, if it did work… she could barely think about what would mean if the device worked.

Having something like this would be important for the SGC, if they could control it, but of course she wouldn’t be able to reveal the device, once she had decided to hide it. Also, even if she were to communicate with another universe, then what?

She couldn’t just face Janet and say ‘I love you and you died, and I couldn’t live without you’. There were too many things wrong with that. No, she would need to find a way to talk to Janet without scaring her, and without getting arrested in another universe.

There were so many complications to think about, she shouldn’t do it, but it was too late to go back. Once she had stepped on that road, she needed to follow it to the end.

Sam could have said she regretted the decision, but it wouldn’t be strictly true. She dreaded the consequences of her choices, but if it worked, if she could see Janet again, even if just once, then it would all be worth it, and she would have no regrets.

She wouldn’t put her own universe at risk, of course not, she was still the same person, and she had the same morals, even if this one action went against them. Still, she wouldn’t risk other people’s lives and safety, she would be careful not to bring any danger into this universe by using the device.

Sam was sure that she could do this, that she could find a way to see Janet again without risking the safety of her own universe. She knew that she could do it, because she had to, because there was no other option.

She wished she could have someone to talk about this, anyone, but she couldn’t. Although she had people that she trusted, she didn’t want to force them to decide between their loyalty to her and their loyalty to the SGC. Moreover, she didn’t want to force anyone to share in the guilt of what she was doing.

Perhaps, if everything worked as it was supposed to, then she would be able to talk to Janet about this, but in the meantime, she had to deal with everything herself.

\---

At first, the device refused to work, and Sam feared that all that she had done had been for nothing.

She had to work on her research in secret, but that wasn’t as difficult as it could seem, despite how tight the security around the SGC was. As long as she worked on her other projects as well, no one would have cause to think that she was doing something that she wasn’t supposed to. Not only that, but she had the lab to herself most of the time, unless she went out and asked another scientist for assistance.

Sam had to be discreet, of course she had, but she could work on it for a couple hours each day, even if it meant that she had to work longer hours than she was used to. Which was saying something, considering how long she would normally spend at the SGC.

So, when after a couple weeks of research she still didn’t have a clue as to how to make the device work, she began to fear that it never worked as advertised.

The inscriptions, once they were translated, were actually pretty clear. The device was supposed to open a connection to another universe, with the point of connection being the equivalent to the one in which the device was activated.

In that, it was already different to the quantum mirror, and it would work better for what she needed. She could open the connection anywhere, including Janet’s home, if only she could make the device work.

It also claimed that, when a connection to a particular universe happened for the first time, it would be assigned a numerical code by the device, and by imputing a previous code, it could be used to connect again to a universe that had already been visited.

In that, it also seemed simpler than the quantum mirror.

The best part was that it didn’t exactly opened a door, not on the exact sense of the word. It only allowed for the passage of whatever or whoever was in direct contact with the device, so there would be little to no risk of someone using that connection to invade her universe, which was one of her concerns.

However, she still couldn’t find a way to even turn the device on, and that was the problem.

Sam had just began to wonder if there was something on the planet needed for it to work when the light coming out of it, already faint, began to falter even further, and that was what made her think of the solution.

It seemed almost too simple to be real, but if the device wasn’t working, maybe it was because it was… out of batteries.

It wasn’t nothing as direct as that, but after a few more days of investigating, she came to the conclusion that the device needed to be charged by an outside powersource. It did seem to be able to hold that power, so she came to the conclusion that it could be charged and then used, maybe a few times even, before the next time it needed to be charged.

There wasn’t a powersource on the planet, at least not on the area they had explored, so there was no real need to go back looking for one. Besides, she could fabricate one on Earth, probably.

Officially, she was working on a way of improving the naquadah generators. The way that she was working on it made her excuse plausible, and perhaps she could even find a way of doing some modifications, as she was looking for a way of connecting it to the device.

The society that created that device had clearly moved beyond wired connections, as there was external opening to the device, nor could she find any way of opening it. However, she wouldn’t let that get in the way. She had the device, and she had a powersource, all that she needed to do was to find a way of charging the device by using that powersource. It wasn’t exactly simple, but it was still something within the helm of possibility.

Sam had, after all, found solutions to harder problems in the past, and she had an excellent motivator.

She was planning things almost one step at a time. She still had no idea how she would find the right universe, the right Janet, and she had even less idea of how she would approach that Janet. Each decision would have their own time, it was best to face these problems one by one, no matter how long it took.

Sam had hope now, tangible hope that could fit in the palm of her hand, and she wouldn’t let any problems get in her way.

One day, she would see Janet again, and that small device was the key to that meeting.

Her Janet was still dead, Sam would never be able to forget that, but looking for another version of Janet wasn’t ignoring that, nor was it denying Janet’s death.

But the one she was looking for _was_ her Janet too, even if not anymore. Sam was looking for the universe that had separated from hers, so, in way, despite Janet’s death, it would be as if she had been saved.

Sam tried not to think too much of those implications, but nothing could make her change her mind now. She had fallen too far down the rabbit role, and there was no way back, only forward.

She had already stolen a potentially dangerous alien device, now she had to make use of it, and she wouldn’t give up until she found the universe that fit what she needed.

Sam would see Janet again, that was her mantra. She would see Janet again, soon, and what else would happen after that remained to be seen, but at the very least, she would have a chance to say goodbye, and that was more than what she had now.

Sam would see Janet again, and that would make all the sacrifices worth it.


	10. Falling into routine

Janet started going back to her routine.

She wasn’t overworking herself like she had been before, she wouldn’t have been able to keep that up for long, and the exhaustion had soon stopped being a comfort and became just a way to keep punishing herself for something that at times she thought of as her fault.

On the good days, she could admit to herself that it wasn’t her fault, that Sam knew the risks of her job and accepted them, and that there was nothing that Janet could have done to save her.

Still, at times she couldn’t help but blame herself, even if she rationally knew that it wasn’t her fault. Those were the bad days, the ones that she could barely made it out of the bed, and had to force herself to go to work.

However, as time went by, the good days began outnumbering the bad, more and more, until the bad days were the ones that came as a surprise.

Things were… not good, not exactly anyway, but… going.

In time, she became almost used at being at the SGC without Sam. Most people around her, with the exception of Sam’s closest friends, seemed to have forgotten her, despite her work still being all around them.

Then something would happen, and the memory of Sam would become freshly visceral all over again, not just to Janet, but to all of them.

Maybe the gate stopped working, and no one could make it start again, and the Earth was cut off from its allies for a week before a team of scientists managed to fix whatever was wrong, usually by a mix of some science and a lot of luck, and they weren’t always able to explain how they fixed it.

Maybe a piece of alien technology went rogue, and too many people died before it was stopped, and whatever caused it had to be destroyed instead of studied.

Maybe a new technology was found, and it could really help the SGC, but no one could find a way to make it work, so it was sent to Area 51 to be essentially forgotten, just one more thing that they would never find a way to use.

They missed Sam for her usefulness, but Janet would miss her in so many other moments.

When they had blue jello at the cafeteria, when Janet heard about some new sci-fi movie, and imagined how Sam would pick it apart, when Janet managed to figure out a particularly challenging medical problem, usually involving exposure to alien technology or organisms, and the solution was something that Sam would have liked to hear.

It still hurt, when she remembered that Sam wasn’t there, but little by little she was becoming able to see things that reminded her of Sam and feeling fondness first, and not just pain.

Janet wouldn’t lie to herself and pretend that she was over Sam’s death. At times, she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to get over what happened, and in some of these, she wondered if she even wanted to get over it.

However, she had resigned herself to the fact that Sam was no longer a part of her life, and that there was nothing that she could do to change this.

Even though she wasn’t well versed in psychology, as a doctor she knew the power of routines.

Keeping a good routine was the first thing in recovery, a bit like the psychological equivalent of faking until you make it. Acting as if things were fine while admitting to herself that they weren’t, not yet anyway, allowed her room to get to a place where things were fine again.

The routine helped her keep herself under control, and it offered some level of comfort. If every day was the same, then she knew what to do, and she knew what was expected of her. She could prepare herself for what was needed.

Even the crisis were part of the routine, with the frequency that they happened. Rarely a week went by without problems, in a larger or smaller degree. Most days, she could still save everyone, but even when she couldn’t, in a way she was getting used to it.

People died, it was part of life, and she couldn’t stop that, no matter how much she tried.

The routine helped deal with that, even, with that sense of powerlessness that took over her whenever she lost a patient. If she thought of it as part of her routine, even if an unpleasant part, then she could accept it, or at the very least tolerate it.

She went back and forward between trying to think of Sam’s death as just one of those things that happened, part of life at the SGC with all the risks that it entailed, and setting it aside as the one lost that she couldn’t tolerate, due to the unfairness of it all.

She tried not to think of Sam’s death in those terms, because every death was unfair, especially of the people who were dedicating their lives to protecting others. And that unfairness only grew when that death was pointless, like Sam’s had been, yes, but not only hers. She wasn’t the only one to have died for nothing, whose death didn’t save anyone else, didn’t change the balance of power in the galaxy.

It hurt Janet more that Sam had suffered that fate, but Sam’s fate wasn’t exclusively hers, and so many others had suffered through that as well.

And then Janet would come around and think that Sam was special, that her role in everything about the stargate program made her different.

It _was_ different that Sam had been the one that died, it _was_ more unfair that her death had been pointless, because Sam had given everything to the program, Sam was the reason they were even able to get their system working, and she was the one that made it so Earth could, if not go toe to toe, at least present a valid challenge to even the most advanced alien species.

It was different because Sam was different.

Janet tried not to think about it in those terms, because it only make it so much harder to deal with what had happened.

Janet couldn’t think that Sam deserved to live more than the other people who worked there, because she couldn’t allow herself to think that one person, any person, no matter how important they were to the program and to the world, was more deserving to live than anybody else.

If she allowed herself to go down that road, then she wouldn’t be able to move forward, so she couldn’t allow herself to think about what happened in those terms.

In a way, she was still pushing some of her feelings away, she was still trying to ignore some of the things that crossed through her mind.

It wasn’t a perfect system, but she was trying.

Janet had to become used again to not having anyone she could count on, no one to share her pain with, and that wasn’t easy.

Often she thought that the hardest part about losing Sam had been losing her best friend, and not her secret lover. She didn’t have anyone she could talk to, not really, not without holding back some of the things that she wanted to talk about the most.

It was scary, how alienating their jobs were. Because of what she did, because of all that they did at the SGC, and how big a part that was to their lives, it was next to impossible having close friends that weren’t a part of the program as well. However, having friends in the program came with the detachment of knowing that any of them might die on a regular work day, and then it would be business as usual before the body could even be buried.

It was a recipe for disaster, but they had no choice other than making due, because that was all that they had. Someone had to protect the planet, someone had to keep the fight going, someone had to sacrifice so that the rest of the people could be safe.

That too, was unfair. That too, wasn’t supposed to be like this. But the only other option was to do nothing and watch as the world was conquered and destroyed, what survived of humanity left to be enslaved.

So she went back to her routine, now aware, like she had never been before, about how wrong it was that they had to live like this, that the best they could hope for was keeping sure that they enemies stayed away, and that living to see another day was optional at best.

However, even if she could go back and warn herself of all the pain in her future if she decided to accept that top secret assignment, she wouldn’t have made a different choice. She couldn’t let others risk their lives while she did nothing, and even if that wasn’t the case, the program still gave her her daughter, and she wouldn’t give up Cassie for nothing, and the program still gave her Sam, even if only to take her away.

Conflicting didn’t even begin to cover her feelings about this whole situation, that what had given her everything had demanded so much in return.

But such was the way that things were, and if she were able to go back and change anything, the only thing she would change was Sam’s death.

It was the one thing she struggled to accept the most, the one thing that she needed to force herself to accept, and so often couldn’t.

It made her feel so powerless, that she couldn’t control herself, that she couldn’t stop her mind from going places that she didn’t want it to go, that she couldn’t stop the same unwanted thoughts from coming back over and over again.

And she tried to acknowledge these feelings. And she tried to ignore these feelings. And she tried to accept these feelings.

She tried many different things, often conflicting, all in hopes that one day she could go back to living a life close to normal.

Some days were good, some days were bad, but when things were bad, they were almost unbearable.

At times, she thought she would break apart in pain, but she tried to ignore all those feelings, and she tried to pretend that things would be fine again soon.

And everytime that she managed to pull herself back together, everytime that she managed to push the pain away and convince herself that she was finally coming around to accepting what had happened, she would lock away another piece of her heart, and hope that she could keep it away forever.

But she kept to her routine, and she hoped that would mean that things would go back to normal, as long as she could act as if everything was normal.

It was what everyone else did around her, it was what everyone did at the SGC, because it was the only thing that they could do, because there was no way to deal with all that they saw in a healthy way, at least not any way that they had found.

And the perspective that this would be how her life would be like, for the rest of her days, that trying to cope and trying to stick to her routine and trying to force herself not to feel her own pain, was unbearable.

So she went back to her routine, and she struggled to convince herself to accept Sam’s death, and she did everything she could not to cry, not to let the pain out, because if she did, she wouldn’t be able to pull herself back together.

As long as she was able to keep at her routine, as long as she could make herself keep going, then everything would be fine.


	11. Secrets kept

The device worked better than Sam could ever have hoped.

A single charge would last for days, which meant that she didn’t have to worry about always having access to a naquadah generator.

Connecting the two had been tricky, but once she realized that the surface of the device was designed to absorb large amounts of energy, it was simply a matter of making the naquadah generator discharge that energy in a more targeted manner.

Knowing when the battery was full required a bit of guesswork the first time. After having a frame of reference to calculate how much energy it needed, she could know how long it would work and how long it would need to be charged for, as long as she was careful and kept records of how long she kept it active, down to the seconds.

At first, she was terrified at the thought of turning it on. If anything bad happened, if something didn’t go as planned, it would be her fault. She could be jeopardizing the world that she fought so hard to protect, even if she never meant to hurt anyone. But the thing about her decision to steal the device was that she couldn’t just turn back, not without making her betrayal be for nothing. So she needed to use it, regardless of how she felt about the possible outcomes.

The first time she activated it, she only dared to keep it on for a couple seconds. She had placed a sheet of paper with ‘my universe’ written on it on the wall in front of her station, so she would know if she was transported. Not her brightest moment, but it would do the trick.

Sam activated it, and saw the numbers forming inside of it, showing in a bright purple light against the pitch black of the device. It was a long string of numbers, eighteen digits, and after quickly memorizing them, she looked at the wall, and, confirming she was still in her universe, she shut down the device.

Still, while it was active, she could feel something different in the air, something that told her that it had worked.

It took a few more tries before she truly understood how it worked. Touching the device in a certain way would open the connection, then moving her fingers to a different position allowed her to cross. She only crossed once, and by accident, moving back to her own universe as fast as she could. She didn’t need to cross for what she wanted to do, not at first, anyway.

The connection was enough to allow her to hack into the SGC from her own computer, although at times it was almost too easy. In half the universes her credentials would even work, so she wouldn’t need to hack the system.

Hacking into the alternate universe’s SGC allowed her to know how that universe was like, and how close it was to her own.

It was too easy, all she had to do was take a few personnel files, and a few mission reports. That was all that she needed to be able to determine if that universe was the one she was looking for.

The best part was that the connection was only possible through her computer if she was directly touching it, meaning no one else could stumble upon it. The range of the device was one of her favorite things about the way it worked, it wouldn’t affect anything that wasn’t in a chain of contact with it, so Sam had to be holding it and touching the computer if she wanted to use it.

Another thing that she loved about it was that the other universe didn’t seem to be able to contact her, not without an initial input from her own. If her computer connected to the other universe’s network and asked for some information, the information would get back to her universe, but it couldn’t be spontaneously sent.

That made the device almost safe to use. Almost, because dealing with parallel realities would always carry some level of risk. Still, the risk was low enough that it was able to convince Sam that there was no harm in contacting multiple universes.

After having contacted a few, she came to the conclusion that the numbers were assigned to that particular universe based on the distance between the significant events of the past. The closer their past was, the closer the universes would be.

Not only that, but the numbers could be manually inputted, which was a bit tricky since the device had no keyboard, but it ultimately just a matter of where to touch.

Unfortunately, she also found that she couldn’t just select a number and then force the connection. The numbers were only valid once both the universes had been connected at some point post separation.

If she wanted to connect to a universe and didn’t have a number available, she could simply use what she called the random button. It would, as far as she could tell, only connect to a universe she hadn’t connected to before.

So, she had to be careful, and write the numbers to any and all universes she connected to, or risk missing the one that she was looking for.

She would write notes on each of them, based on the facts that she had found hacking the SGC’s system, hoping that one day she would get to one that would be just as she wanted.

Of course, the world didn’t stop spinning because she had a mission, because she had something that she needed to do. The future of her mission depended on her being able to keep using the device without interference from anyone, and to do that she had to keep doing her job, not giving anyone cause to suspect her.

This was her secret to keep, and even if she trusted her friends to keep it in case it was necessary, she couldn’t do this to them. The guilt still weighted on her heart, weeks after she had stolen the device. She would never ask them to withstand that same guilt, even though she thought about it, from time to time.

Keeping secrets from them was painful, and she had known that for a long time, she had known that since she first started her relationship with Janet, and on a smaller degree, even before.

The thing was, she hadn’t thought of her sexuality as a secret before, just something she couldn’t act on, which wasn’t that much of a distinction. She was still bi when she was with a man, but it was easier not to say anything than having to hope that it wouldn’t get out and risk her career.

Keeping secrets was a natural part of her job, the only difference was that this was something that not even her superiors could know, nothing else. It wasn’t even a big distinction, if she thought about it. Hiding parts of who she was was no different than hiding parts of what she did.

Janet had been the first person she could be entirely honest to, and she had never realized until then how much she missed having someone who could know everything about her, Sam couldn’t even remember if she ever had anyone else like this in her life.

Keeping secrets was inevitable, and this was simply a different kind of secret from all the ones that she had before, so she shouldn’t have any problem with it, even if she didn’t want to keep it a secret.

Telling anyone would just put them at risk, and relieve her own guilt, and she couldn’t be as selfish, even though she realized how selfish even taking the device had been.

And while she was just searching for a universe, there was nothing even to be said. Her friends wouldn’t act against her, not in a way that would get her arrested for treason, and possibly executed, but they could try to stop her from using the device, if they thought that this was what was best for her.

Sam didn’t know if seeing Janet again was what was best for her, or if she should never have even considered that idea, but it was what she needed, even if not what would be in her best interest, so she had to keep trying.

By the time she caught a good rhythm, she could test half a dozen universes in a good day, while still doing everything that she was supposed to. Most of the time, she could dismiss an universe in a matter of minutes, because she would find a file that said Janet was dead, or maybe she would see that in that universe Sam was never a part of the program, or, more rarely, Janet was never a part of the program. Those were easier to dismiss.

There were trickier universes, of course. Universes in which Janet was part of the SGC and left sometime after Cassie, or in which Sam was the one to quit and become a civilian consultant. Occasionally, neither of them were never in the Air Force, but they were still involved in the program as civilians.

But she didn’t want just any Janet that was still alive, and that was what made things so complicated.

Sam wanted her Janet, or the closest to her that still existed. Which meant that she had to find the universe that duplicated from her own just a few months before.

She needed the universe that shared the same past as hers, but where Janet was still alive. And preferably, she needed Sam to be dead in that one.

It wasn’t that she wanted Janet to suffer or to be in pain, but Sam could only safely visit a universe where she didn’t exist anymore, and not only that, but a Janet that had lost her Sam would probably be more willing to talking to her in secret. Sam wanted to see her again, she needed to see her, but Sam also didn’t want to risk being arrested in another universe.

If she was caught, no one would know where she was, and there would be no way of rescuing her. It was a big risk, and one that made her wonder if leaving a message behind before deciding to visit another universe would be a good idea. But even if she did warn her team, they wouldn’t be able to go after her, not without another device, and she had no idea how to go about making one, and finding one would be even harder.

Ultimately, it would be about a leap of faith. She would have to go because she needed, not because it was a sound decision, and she would have to go knowing that there was a good chance that she wouldn’t go back.

And she would never forgive herself if she couldn’t come back.

Sam knew that she had people in her universe that cared about her, people that counted on her. Cassie, for starters, had already lost a mother, she didn’t need to lose her godmother as well. Then Jack, Teal’c and Daniel, after everything they had been through together, they deserved better than to have her disappear one day, never knowing what happened to her. And her brother, he wouldn’t be told anything, just that she was missing in action, and he wouldn’t be able to even know if he could hope that she would be found alive or not. And her father, he would move mountains to find her, he would try to convince the Tok’ra to use all their resources to search for her, and that would only make them push him further away.

Sam had to come back, whatever else happened. She wanted to see Janet again, she needed to see Janet again, but she wouldn’t stay in another universe, not even by force.

She still had too much in her own universe that was worth fighting for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: references to homophobia and DADT.


	12. Secrets revealed

It was a bad day.

In fact, bad day didn’t even begin to cover it.

It was a day in which Janet couldn’t stand the weight of existence, she couldn’t stand what was expected of her and what had happened.

For just one day, she couldn’t stand to be alive.

She didn’t go to work, phoning in with a bad excuse she wouldn’t even remember using, because she couldn’t force herself to leave her home, to even leave her bed.

It was all too much, Sam and all that lies that Janet had told, mostly to herself. She couldn’t keep going with that charade, not anymore.

Perhaps she already knew that this would blow in her face, that all of her recovery was just a lie, just an attempt to trick herself into being alright when she knew that she wasn’t, and that maybe she would never be.

Perhaps she knew, but she wanted to believe the lie, she wanted to believe that there was a light at the end of the tunnel and that it was getting closer.

But things weren’t better, Sam was still gone, and Janet still had a hole with Sam’s shape in her heart. Things weren’t better, and she was beginning to lose hope that they would ever be.

Faking that she was feeling better could only work for so long, only while she could believe that one day that would turn into reality. As soon as she lost that hope, then her performative recovery became just as trapping as her pain.

For every time that she had found that she was feeling better, that maybe she was in the right path, now every feeling of pain and anger and frustration was coming back stronger than ever, and she couldn't force herself to push them away again.

That day, she was a servant of her emotions, and their prisoner as well.

Janet never missed work, she never stayed at home, but she wasn't worried that someone would come to check on her.

Sam was the only one to care enough about her to come, but of course Sam couldn't come over there to check on her, because Sam was dead, and that was exactly the problem.

Janet could lie to herself and pretend, but she wasn't over Sam’s death, and if she was honest with herself, maybe she never truly believed that she would ever be.

Sam’s death was a turning point, one of the defining moments of her life, and she could never go back, not even to the person that she used to be before she met Sam.

Her attempts at holding on to the person that she used to be were in reality attempts at holding on to Sam, to the life that they had.

To move on, she would need to abandon herself, and she didn't know how to do that, she didn't know if she even could.

She didn't go to work, and stayed in her bed. The sun came and went, and she couldn't tell, she didn't care enough about the world around her. The world could have ended in a blaze of fire and she wouldn't have noticed.

She stayed in bed, and didn't do anything, except crying at times, and at others staying in absolute silence, looking at her bedroom small without seeing it. She was barely able to do anything other than just letting her feelings pass her by.

She couldn't keep going like this, but she didn't know what to do, she didn't know how to escape. The pain was too great, and she couldn't stand to keep feeling like this, she couldn't stand to deal with this pain any longer.

But there was no escape in sight, she couldn’t think of anyway to leave this situation, so all that she had was the pain that consumed her.

\---

Cassie fished for her keys inside her purse. Her mom’s car was in the garage, but the lights were out, and that was odd. It was too early for her mom to be sleeping, especially because she knew that Cassie was coming.

Cassie tried to come back home as often as she could, but she would always warn her mom before coming, and they had talked earlier that week about how Cassie was going back home after classes ended on Friday. Cassie had managed to get there a little early, as she didn’t have her last class, but her mom should still be waiting for her.

She opened the door, and the entire house was dark. Another odd thing, but she was trying not to get too worried just yet. Maybe her mom was picked up by the SGC personnel for an emergency and that’s why the house was dark but her car was in the garage.

“Mom,” Cassie called in the dark house, softly at first, then repeated louder. No answer came.

She kept walking through the house, trying to find any signs of were her mom could be, finally getting close to her room.

As she approached her mom’s room, she could hear a faint noise, like muffled crying. She opened the door slowly, calling out, “Mom?”

The crying stopped, and Janet stood up on her bed, startled.

“Cassie? What are you doing here?” Janet asked, drying her face against her sleeve.

“It’s Friday, I told you I was coming, remember?” Cassie said softly, not wanting to startle her mother any further.

Janet shook her head. “Yes, I’m sorry, I lost track of time.”

No explanation for the tears came.

Cassie had a decision to make.

“Are you ok?”

“I’m fine, nothing to worry about.”

Cassie sighed. Even now her mom insisted on treating her as a child, in hiding her pain from Cassie as if Cassie couldn’t take it, as if Cassie hadn’t been through so much during her life.

“This is about Sam, right?” Cassie asked, and she could hear her mom’s breath catch.

Cassie had known about them for a long time. How could she not? That was her mom she was talking about, in fact, they were the two people Cassie was closest to on Earth.

She couldn’t tell a moment in which she realized that they were in love. Kids don’t notice that kind of thing, but they don’t _not _notice it either, so it was as if that was always there. Sam and Janet were always together in her mind, there was never a moment in which that wasn’t true.__

__But she also noticed very early on, although she wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the exact moment, that no one was supposed to talk about that. It wasn’t odd to her, there were so many things that she couldn’t mention, that she wasn’t supposed to talk about, that it never even registered as a big deal._ _

__She was much older when she realized that the reason why she wasn’t supposed to talk about, actually, that she wasn’t even supposed to know about it, was that some silly rules said that Sam and Janet couldn’t be together. It was one of the cultural shocks that she had to deal with, and one that hit her subtly, after a long time._ _

__Because the thing was, before, back on the planet she had been born in, and that somewhere along the way she had stopped thinking of as home, people got married because they loved each other, and that meant at times women married women and men married man. It took her a long time to notice… not exactly the absence of that on Earth, but rather the way that so many people acted, as if that was wrong for no reason that Cassie could find._ _

__So she was well into her teenage years when she realized that that was the reason why Sam and Janet had to keep their relationship a secret, even from her. It hurt, knowing that her mom wouldn’t trust her with this, but she was old enough to understand that keeping secrets became like a second nature, and soon you wouldn’t to talk even to the people that you could talk to. It was easier to keep quiet, and hope that no one would ever find out things that could be used to destroy your life._ _

__So maybe Cassie had some experience with keeping secrets. If she could handle not talking about her birth planet most of the time, she could handle not mentioning that she knew her mom was in love with her godmother. That is, until it crossed the line._ _

__Because Cassie would see that her mom was falling apart and refusing to acknowledge it. She was seeing that since the first time she saw her mom after Sam’s death. Her mom was stubborn, and she wouldn’t ask for help, but Cassie could tell that she needed someone to talk to, someone who knew what she was going through._ _

__Still, Cassie didn’t say anything, because she was afraid that her mom wouldn’t like the fact that she knew, and because Cassie knew her well enough to know that she still thought of her as a child, and wouldn’t want to burden her with the additional grief._ _

__But now things were getting out of hand, if her mom was crying alone in her room in the dark. Cassie couldn’t keep that secret any longer._ _

__Her mom hesitated for far longer than it would be normal, it was as if literal minutes had gone by, even if realistically it had probably been closer to half a minute._ _

__“I don’t....” she started._ _

__Cassie shook her head, they couldn’t do this, not now. “I know about you and Sam, mom. I know you were together.”_ _

__A myriad of expressions crossed her mom’s face, panic, fear, shock, pain, relief… too many to even count._ _

__“I can’t.”_ _

__It was the only answer that she had to offer._ _

__Cassie sighed, and came to sit at the end of the bed. “I kinda figured that. Something about military regulations and a ridiculous acronym. I actually have a professor that quit the military to live with his husband, he mentioned something about it,” Cassie said, trying to sound casual, since she knew how much of a shock that must have been for her mom._ _

__“Since when? I mean, when did you find out?”_ _

__“I have no idea. Seeing you two together was just so natural, I never stopped to think about it. It was just part of my life,” Cassie said, staring into the distance._ _

__“I don’t understand, if you knew, then why did you never say anything?”_ _

__Cassie shrugged. “I figured I wasn’t supposed to. I had to become really good at knowing what I could talk about and what I couldn’t, and I always figured that was better safe than sorry. Except for that time I used to drop hints about being an alien and enjoy watching people not figure it out,” Cassie cringed at that last part. That was an embarrassing phase, she was glad to have grown out of it._ _

__“I’m sorry,” her mom said finally, reaching out to hold her hand. “I never meant to burden you with another secret. I wanted to tell you for a long time, but I was so afraid of asking you to keep another secret, your life was hard enough already.”_ _

__“I get it, but you’re falling apart, mom, and you don’t have to be alone. If no one else can know, if it has to be a secret to everyone else, then at least you can count on me, at least you can talk to me. I’m not a kid anymore, and I understand too well what is like, losing people that you love.”_ _

__Her mom pulled her for a hug, burying her face on Cassie’s hair. Cassie held her back, trying to transmit some comfort._ _

__“I miss her so much, I don’t know how I can go back to being myself,” she finally confessed._ _

__“I know, I know what that’s like, and you can’t be, not the person that you were before. You have to find out who you are now, and what does that mean. And it’s the hardest thing in the world, and it’s so tempting to let go of everything in the past, but you can’t, because even if you changed you’re still the same person.”_ _

__“When did you get so wise?”_ _

__Cassie chuckled, with just a touch of sadness. “I think Earth people say that kids grown when their parents aren’t looking.”_ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: implied suicidal thoughts, referenced homophobia, DADT.


	13. Ideal candidate

Sam found her.

Sam couldn’t believe that she actually found her.

Janet, her Janet, alive and well.

Except, it wasn’t her Janet, not anymore, and Sam had to remind herself of that.

From a physics standpoint, it was hard to tell the difference, aside from those months since Janet died, and Sam wasn’t entirely sure if Janet had been an entirely different person from the start, simply living a life exactly like the one that her Janet had lived, down to the smallest details, or if they both had been the same person, up to the moments preceding Janet’s death, and their existences were only separated by that one point of divergence.

It would be an interesting topic of philosophical discussion, but their physics were still centuries away of being able to tell the difference between the two.

Sam preferred to believe that the second option was the right one, because it would mean that, in a way, her Janet was still alive, only away from her. Because Sam had found the perfect universe, and that meant that she was dead.

The mission happened mostly the same way that it had happened in her own universe, down to Jack being injured and Janet going to the planet to save him. The only difference was that Sam was the one to die on that mission, being shot at random, just some bad luck that meant that she was the one to die.

The same way that in her universe, Janet had been the one to die, just some bad luck.

It was all just bad luck, if she were to believe in such things.

Sam checked every single mission report that she could find, and every one of them to happen before P3X-666 was exactly the same, down to the commas. She checked again and again, and everything before that date seemed to be the same, at least on paper, and that was all that she could check anyway, without crossing over.

So she studied that point of divergence, trying to understand the universe that she was thinking about contacting.

Sam died, instantly, on a mission to P3X-666. Janet saved several other lives on that same mission, but didn’t even attest Sam’s death until they were back at the SGC. Janet kept working, until she requested one and a half personal days, citing that she needed to talk to Cassie, and bring her to the funeral.

On paper, there was nothing to indicate that she and Sam had ever had a romantic relationship, but Sam wasn’t expecting to find any, anyway. The Janet she knew wouldn’t stop being discreet just because she was grieving, her work was too important to her.

But since all other things were alike, she had no reason not to believe that in that universe she had been together with Janet. It would be odd if she weren’t, and all other things happened exactly alike in both universes. More than odd, a statistical improbability. So Sam decided to trust her gut and the math, and made an educated guess that this was the Janet that she was looking for.

Which brought with it a whole other set of implications, that she wasn’t sure that she was ready to deal with.

The thing was, while she was looking for that universe, it was all theoretical. She could spend her entire life looking for it and never found it, such was the way that the probabilities work.

Finding it so fast was like deciding to play the lottery one day on a whim, and then winning a record breaking prize. She wasn’t ready for it.

It wasn’t as if she never thought she would find Janet, she had hope, she actually had hope. But she never thought it would happen so fast, she never thought she would need to be ready to face Janet so fast, because it wasn’t an easy thing.

Sam now had a way to meet again the love of her life, the same person that she saw die because she couldn’t do anything to stop it. Of all the fantastical things she had seen in her years on this job, this had to hold a special place.

She didn’t know how she would react to seeing Janet alive in front of her again, but even worse, she didn’t know how Janet would react. How could she even imagine Janet’s reaction? After all, this was so far off anything that Sam had ever imagined herself doing, and yet there she was.

Now that she had found the ideal candidate, she didn’t know anymore if she was able to go through with it.

She wanted to see Janet again more than anything, she needed to see her again, she couldn’t imagine going on with her life without that.

And yet, there was nothing that she feared more now than standing in front of Janet, after everything that had happened, everything that they had gone through, separately, since their universes took different paths.

Perhaps Janet wouldn’t even want to see her, or talk to her. Perhaps Janet would be over her death already, and wouldn’t want to open that door again. Perhaps Janet wouldn’t believe that Sam was who she said she was and would have her arrested.

Or even worse, perhaps Janet didn’t love her as much as Sam did, and the time since her death was enough for Janet to stop loving her.

Sam couldn’t even bring herself to truly consider the possibilities, because if she did, she would be paralyzed by fear.

She kept activating the connection again, trying to gather more information, but nothing else was useful.

Janet wasn’t a field agent, so she didn’t appear in many reports, more in medical charts, and those weren’t enough for Sam to have any idea about the type of person that she was now. Grief could change people, as Sam herself could attest, after stealing the device the way she did, so it was next to impossible to predict how Janet was now, after so long.

Sam wondered if Janet would even recognize her. She felt as if she had changed so much, maybe Janet would recognize her face, but not her actions, not what she was willing to do. She would be just another alternate version of a familiar face, sharing nothing more than appearances and a few characteristics, but still fundamentally a different person.

Sam certainly felt as if she was fundamentally different, losing Janet was a trauma, and had too great an effect on her for her to say anything else. She changed, and couldn’t go back to being the person that she was before that loss, but the great question was, was that change enough to place her as a completely separate person? She wasn’t sure about that, one way or the other. And that terrified her.

What would she even do, if she stood in front of Janet, and Janet rejected her, as not being in any way like the Sam that had died? Could she live up to the expectations set by memories and a ghost? Could Janet live up to her own expectations? The ghost of Janet was ever present in her life, especially since she moved to Janet’s house, everything seemed to evoke a memory, it was almost like having a presence, not in a spiritual sense, but in a psychological sense.

If the same thing happened to Janet, maybe she wouldn’t be able to or want to handle seeing Sam in person.

Now that the possibility, on a physics sense, was set, she had far too many doubts. And yet, Sam knew that she had to go through with this.

Everything that she had done since finding the device, all the lying and all the risks, all happened just to make that moment possible. To ignore the possibility of seeing Janet again now that she had found the right universe would be not only impossible, but also a waste of all her sacrifices up to this point. She couldn’t go back, ever since she decided to take that device, she couldn’t go back, the only way was forward.

And still she hesitated.

Even though there was an infinite number of universes, her odds of finding even one as she wanted was already low enough, finding two would be like finding two people on Earth that shared not only DNA, but fingerprints and a date of birth, not entirely impossible, but statistically improbable, not say the least. It was the sort of thing that just didn’t happen, enough decimal houses after the zero to be rounded down to impossible.

Which meant Sam only had one chance.

After finding this Janet, Sam wouldn’t be able to settle for anything less, so she needed to make things work, but as long as she didn’t do anything, things couldn’t go wrong. She wasn’t one to shy away from risks, as far as most things were concerned, but relationships were always her weak spot, and she had made bad decisions out of fear more than once.

She just wanted to talk to Janet once, just one last time. All she needed was one chance to say goodbye, and then she would be able to move on. She had told herself that, over and over again, because she needed to convince herself that once was enough, if she decided to go through with this, if she met Janet again, she couldn’t make a habit out of this. Things were already too dangerous as they were.

She couldn’t keep prolonging the danger. She needed to contact the other universe, cross over, and talk to Janet, then she needed to come back and destroy the device once and for all, and forget all of this even happened in the first place. Anything else would be an unacceptable risk. As long as that device existed, there was a chance of it being discovered, which would end her career and possibly her life, and even worse, a chance that it could fall on the wrong hands. She couldn’t keep that risk for much longer, not after all the time she had already taken until finding that universe.

If she believed in signs, then finding that universe would have been a sign, but even as it was, it was still the opportunity she had been looking for, and she gained nothing by waiting.

There was nothing more that she could learn about the parallel universe, not without a visit, so there was no point in delaying that final contact, but she couldn’t force herself to act.

The very idea that, by going to another universe, she might be forgoing her life was enough to give her pause. She couldn’t ignore the fact that, even if she took all precautions, there would be still a chance that she could cross to Janet’s universe and never come back, and that wasn’t acceptable, but the risk alone wasn’t enough to make her abandon her mission.

There were too many things to consider, but she would never have better data to make her decision, and every passing second only made things more complicated, instead of less. She needed to go, but to go, she needed to find the best way not only of traveling without being noticed, but of approaching Janet. And that was another can of worms, and one that she was afraid to even touch.

She should have thought of all this before taking the device, then maybe she wouldn’t have hid it, and would have left it alone to be studied by other people, instead of using it for her own reasons. Then again, maybe she would have done the exact same thing, even if she had thought of all the complications, simply because her need of seeing Janet was so big, and it hadn’t decreased in all that time since Janet died.

So she had to go, there was no other choice, at least not one that she could live with. And she had to go soon.

The only thing that she needed to decide was, how was she going to talk to Janet?


	14. Ideal solution

Her talk to Cassie was the last drop.

She never meant to burden her daughter with her own feelings like that, but being unable to shield Cassie from what was going on with her was a wake up call. Things couldn’t keep going as they were.

She needed to find a way to move past her pain that didn’t involve ignoring her own feelings or pretending that everything was fine when it wasn’t. And she could only think of one thing that would give her that.

Janet needed to leave the SGC.

It wasn’t a decision she took lightly. After all, that place had been her home for so long, and it gave her so much. She couldn’t even imagine how her life would have been like if not for the SGC, it was an integral part of her, it shaped her to be who she was.

But, in a way, she had outgrown that place. And by that she meant she had outgrown the toxic culture of pretending that death was an everyday part of the job, something to set you back for a few minutes and then you would drink a beer for your fallen pal and move on.

It wasn’t healthy, but it lead to people that embraced their own deaths, and the program needed that kind of soldier. There were people who joined the program just for the challenge, just to prove that they were the best and feared nothing, but those usually didn’t last, as soon as they realized how high the stakes were, as soon as they saw a team they talked to in the dresser room not come back, all of them death and their fates beyond that unknown, then they would quit.

Only three types of people remained with the program: those who were at least a little bit suicidal and cared about others more than they did their own life and wellbeing, the idealists that couldn’t stand the thought of letting evil go about unchecked and when given the change between doing nothing and staying safe but seeing other people suffer as a result of their actions and doing something to help even knowing that they might die in the process would always chose the former, and those who loved discovery above all else, whose curiosity couldn’t be contained, and who thought any personal risk was worth it as long as humanity learned something new.

And that meant the program needed people to ignore the weight of death and think of it as part of the job. The first kind would gladly accept that chance of dying for a cause that saved them the unpleasantness of suicide. The second kind would only have renovated their faith that this was what needed to be done, regardless of the cost, not only in the name of everyone that they were protecting, but also in the name of everyone that had already given their lives. The third kind would have death brushed off by a shiny new piece of tech and wouldn’t be hit by the gravity of it all until it was too late, and it was their dead body on the ground.

The SGC needed them unhealthy, it needed that toxic culture to survive, because otherwise it would be near impossible to find enough people to send out, knowing that the odds were stacked against them, and that they would be there until they died.

Janet could count on her hands the number of people there that retired or were promoted out of the program. The vast majority to leave had died, and quite a few had been severely harmed, to the point of disability, if they were lucky enough to leave the VA hospital at all.

She had always knew that, deep down, but she never thought of things this way. Sam’s death truly lifted the veil, it allowed her to see this charade for what it was, and now Janet couldn’t go back to ignoring this.

As long as she remained in the SGC, she would remain unhappy, there was no way to go around that.

So she had to leave, now, before she too ended in a body bag. She had to leave, because she would never get better as long as she was there, as long as she saw death everyday and was expected to shrug it off, as if she hadn’t known some of those people for years, as if she didn’t know which of them had kids, sometimes even babies, waiting for them at home.

It took her too long to realise this, she needed to break down in front of her daughter to see things couldn’t keep going as they were.

But there were complications, of course.

At least now Cassie was an adult, and had won her freedom from the program, because if that weren’t the case, then Janet might be afraid of leaving and then losing the right to keep her daughter, not because it was reasonable that only someone in the program might adopt an alien, but because the powers that be (not the general, of course, but people above him) might not like someone who knew as much as she did leaving, and would try to leverage her staying.

Even if Cassie was no longer at risk, they wouldn’t let Janet leave without a fight, but she was ready to face that.

She also couldn’t leave out of nowhere, she could need to train a replacement before leaving, which meant they would have to find a replacement to be trained in the first place, since they were always lacking doctors.

There were many complications with her decision to leave, but she knew that it was the only way for her to get her life back under control. It wouldn’t be easy, but the alternative was staying, and she couldn’t stand that any longer.

Janet didn’t know how to bring this up. She didn’t remember anyone asking to quit the program, just like that, and she wouldn’t doubt if no one ever did it. Which said a lot about the program, and how it had them trapped in place.

Their objectives were noble, but she didn’t know if in the end they were doing the right thing, or instead doing more harm than good. How many wars that they started? At times entire civilizations were destroyed. Especially less experienced teams had a tendency to escalate situations and end up with a worse result than when they first came. And people died, so many people died. Sure, they released many worlds, freeing them from slavery, but they also added Earth in the middle of a galaxy wide conflict.

At one time, Janet had been sure that the total sum of their actions was good, but now she wasn’t so sure, and she couldn’t stay if she wasn’t sure that what they were doing was the right thing.

She never felt so conflicted, because abandoning the program meant she wouldn’t know what was happening, the Earth might be about to be destroyed and she would never hear about it. It would also mean that she wouldn’t have a possibility to be evacuated to another planet in case that happened, and although she wasn’t sure if she would personally be able to abandon her world while billions died, she wanted to be able to make sure that Cassie would be on that evacuation.

Cassie had already seen an entire world be destroyed, and she didn’t deserve to witness that again, but Janet wouldn’t allow her to be killed along with everyone else, be killed for a world that wasn’t even hers to begin with, Cassie had to live. And if Janet decided to leave the SGC, then she would be giving up on her only chance of protecting her daughter. It wasn’t an easy choice to make.

Still, by keeping with the SGC, Janet would increase the chances that she herself would die, and then Cassie would be left alone. After all that she had lost, it wasn’t fair to risk that Cassie would lose her too.

She couldn’t stand what it meant to keep with the program, but she also feared the negative consequences she would have if she abandoned it.

At times like this, she wished that she could talk to Sam, Sam would be able to help her come to a decision, Sam always had a gift for seeing things clearly, at least when it came to personal life versus duty.

She missed Sam, and she wished she could openly say that she missed Sam, but she couldn’t do that while still in the military.

Everything pushed her to leave, but she couldn’t do that without talking to Cassie first, she deserved a say in it, even if Janet wouldn’t leave the decision up to her. Cassie deserved at least a chance to try to convince her mother of whatever it was that she wanted, when this was something that would affect her so greatly.

Janet had already decided that this was what she wanted, but maybe Cassie had something to say that would convince her to the contrary.

After Janet had forced herself to stay on the job for so long after Sam died, the couple of weeks that she would need to talk to Cassie again when she came back home for a weekend didn’t seem like much.

It also conveniently gave her more time to go back on her decision, but she doubted that she would. Once she thought about leaving the program, her heart was filled with relief like she hadn’t felt in a very long time.

The idea of finally being free, of not having to ignore death as if it was something that happened all the time, often to young and healthy people that still had an idealist heart, was too good to pass.

Janet would feel guilty, of course she would. She would be abandoning the fight for Earth, after all, but her role wasn’t to fight. All she could do was try to make sure that as many people as possible got back home alive, and those numbers weren’t good on the best of days.

She could save more lives as a doctor somewhere else, and then she might even be able to get back home every day after work and not feel as if everything she did was pointless. With the experience she acquired at the SGC, along with the rest of her career with the Air Force, she could work anywhere, and she would be good at it.

Even if it were a place with a high mortality rate, like emergency surgery, it would still be less stressful than what she was doing now, and she would still be able to save more lives.

It was tempting, abandoning everything and changing her life, even if she feared the aftermath of it.

Maybe if she was free from the program, then she could actually begin to heal. She tried to focus on that. She had given so much already, and it had taken almost everything from her, she deserved to have a life outside of it.

And she wanted to get her life back, she wanted to get a life, any life, because she couldn’t stand anymore, feeling so lost, as if nothing mattered. Cassie was right, she couldn’t go back to being the person that she was before, and the person that she was before was the SGC’s doctor. Maybe a change of careers wasn’t as drastic as changing planets, but she hoped that with that she could go back to feeling like herself.

After she had a chance to talk to Cassie, she would make her decision final, and then wait around however long it took for her to train a replacement. But after that, she would be free, free of all that pain and suffering, and then maybe, just maybe, she could go back to feeling as if she belonged in her own body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: generic discussions of suicidal behaviors.
> 
> Anyone wanna talk about how grief has made Sam so idealized that Janet actually thinks that Sam knew how to balance personal and professional life?


	15. Letter written

Sam thought about the best way to contact Janet for days.

She would only have one chance to talk to Janet, so she needed to make a good impression. She had to convince Janet that she wasn’t a threat and that they had to talk, and any mistake could have terrible consequences.

She thought about sending a digital message, since that would be the safest thing from Sam’s own perspective, but there were too many problems with that.

For starters, it couldn’t be more distant, and this was deeply personal. If she couldn’t touch Janet in a personal way, Janet would have no reason to even consider accepting the contact.

Their talk was, from a rational point of view, a terrible idea with no redeeming qualities. Only from an emotional point of view could this be justified. Which was why she had to reach Janet’s feelings for the alternate Sam that had died.

Even if she could ignore that, there was the problem of a digital fingerprint.

Sam would be incriminating Janet with her words, even if she tried to be cryptic. She couldn’t say enough to interest Janet in talking to her, while making so that if the communication was found, Janet would have plausible deniability about their relationship. Not only that, but communicating with another universe in secret was treason too, maybe not as serious as Sam’s actions, but still enough to land her in a military prison at best.

So a digital message, even if safer for Sam, even if it would mean that she could know about Janet’s reaction before going to the other universe and risking herself, was out of the question.

She couldn’t keep herself safe by putting Janet at risk, so she needed to find another way.

Just showing up at Janet’s house was also not a good idea.

Sam could check if Janet was alone before going, that would be easy enough. At this point she could use the device with ease, and she knew that one of the functions allowed her to see into that universe without being completely transported, so she could check her surroundings before crossing. It was also useful in preventing that she would cross inside a solid object.

However, that wasn’t the only problem with this scenario.

Janet didn’t know her, in the sense that she didn’t know how different she was from the Sam of her universe, and not only that, but showing up in front of her wearing the face of her dead lover without any warning was cruel at best.

Sam couldn’t even imagine how she would react if she saw Janet standing in front of her with no warning, and without knowing where she came from, and that was considering that she spent the last several weeks getting used to the idea of meeting an alternate version of Janet.

So she couldn’t do that, she couldn’t simply visit Janet without any warning.

After eliminating all other methods she could think of, Sam finally settled on a letter.

Writing a letter was old fashioned, but it could also be personal, and there she could explain everything to Janet.

She could check if no one was home before leaving the letter, and that would decrease the chances of anyone other than Janet finding it. Leaving it during a weekday would also guarantee that Cassie wouldn’t be there. It wasn’t exactly ideal, but it was what she had, what she knew could work.

That, of course, lead to another problem entirely, which was what to write.

What do you say to the surviving alternate version of your dead lover that lost her version of you?

Especially, how do you say it without convincing her that you are out of your mind, lying, or somehow trying to trick her?

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what she could tell Janet to make her agree to a meeting.

Sam had to convince Janet that she was real, and that being able to say goodbye would be both meaningful and healthy for them. Not only that, she had to convince Janet to meet her despite the fact that it would be, as far as Janet would know, a risk to Janet’s own universe that she allowed Sam to be there.

If she thought about it too much, she would end up giving up, so she couldn’t do that. She had to write from the heart and hope for the best, regardless of anything else.

Even so, she dragged on the process for as long as she could.

First, she couldn’t do it at the SGC. There was too much of a risk of getting caught, and there was no way she could explain that letter and not have the device taken away from her. So she had to wait until she was home.

Then, she had no paper. Or she couldn’t find paper. And a couple hours went by of her searching the house and then deciding to drive to the store to buy some.

Then, she couldn’t find a place she could sit and write where she didn’t feel haunted by Janet’s presence, and another few hours of that passed her by, until she finally settled on the kitchen’s table.

And finally, the pen rolled out under the stove and she couldn’t find a way to get it without taking it out of its place.

By the time she finally managed to force herself to sit down and write, half the night was over.

She stared at the blank page, terriified of how to start, of what to say.

Should she start by addressing Janet? And if so, should she call her Janet? Fraiser? Dr. Fraiser? Janet Fraiser? Dr. Janet Fraiser? Should she address her only by name and or title, or should she add something? Hello? Dear? Good morning? Good night? Distinguished Dr. J. Fraiser?

Or maybe she should start by introducing herself. No, that was weird, no one started a letter with their own name, she would think that someone had written Sam and the letter was delivered too late. Start by introducing herself was definitely out of the question.

Great, how was she planning on talking to Janet if she couldn’t even find a way of addressing her in the letter. She always knew this wouldn’t be easy, but she wasn’t expecting it to be so hard.

This was what she wanted, any yet now that she was so close to finally seeing Janet again, she didn’t know what she wanted to say.

Especially on paper, everything sounded so... lacking. She couldn’t translate her feelings into something that would be in any way representative of them.

It would almost be funny, if it wasn’t so damn frustrating. She could find the perfect parallel universe and a way to safely communicate with it, but she couldn’t even write a letter to Janet. Finding what to say was harder than finding a specific universe in a selection of random universes.

But she needed to say something, she needed to write that letter, because the longer passed, the harder it would be to convince Janet to talk to her, and more likely it would be that Sam would be bringing back all that grief to Janet after she had already recovered.

She couldn’t delay this any longer, she had to write this letter, and she had to send it.

She started on the letter, and managed to write three lines before she ripped it to pieces. It was horrible, she didn’t know what about it felt so wrong, but it just did, and she would have to start over.

The next time, she wrote a whole page before tossing it aside, deeming that it made no sense. It still wasn’t what she wanted.

What she felt, what she wanted to say, it wasn’t even clear in her own mind, and trying to force it on paper only made things worse, because then it was definitive, it was set in words that she could pick apart.

The third attempt was destroyed after a single word, and the next several had varying levels of success, despite all meeting the same fate.

This wasn’t working, she couldn’t keep doing this, not this way.

She froze, unable to even start it once more. She wanted it to be perfect, and she couldn’t make it so, which made her afraid of even touching pen to paper.

Finally, she decided to set herself more realistic goals.

It wouldn’t be perfect, it wouldn’t say everything that she wanted it to say, but it would be a way of starting communications, and that was all that it needed to be, because as long as she kept thinking it would have to be perfect, then she wouldn’t be able to finish it. Or even start it, for that matter.

She wanted to be personal, so she shouldn’t use titles or last names. It was a letter delivered directly to Janet’s house from another universe, so being on a first name basis was probably a given.

Other than that, she should probably start by explaining who she was right away. That would be the hardest part to explain, at least in a way that didn’t make Janet want to give the letter straight to the SGC and have them try to track down its origin.

Sam began her explanation, then realized that she had written the word ‘love’ in it. Well, love notes at any rate. She should have to explain that too, before she could go on.

She couldn’t expect Janet to trust her if Janet was afraid of suffering any consequences over receiving that letter, so she had to reassure her that no negative consequences were expected to come from that letter, and that she had taken care so that the letter wouldn’t be discovered by anyone else.

Then, Sam began to worry that Janet would feel offended by the measures that Sam took to make sure that the Janet she was contacting was the right one, and that the letter wouldn’t be discovered by anyone else. Surely that was an invasion of privacy.

She tried to explain why she felt she needed to do that, and to apologize, and soon she realized that she was rambling. Still, she refused to start again, if she did, she would never stop tossing attempts and would never finish a single letter. And she had to finish it.

Instead, she simply decided to put herself back on track.

She had to explain who she was, and that she knew another version of her had died on P3X-666. That was the main thing, and then she had to explain that her Janet had died. Yes, this was the main point that she had to get across.

Sam needed to show that, in a way, they were in the exact same situation, but she also needed to convince Janet about the relation between their two universes.

Sam needed to establish that she was as the Sam that had died, that she was what would have happened to that Sam if she had lost Janet, and that the same thing was true of Janet and the Janet that had died in Sam’s universe.

If she could get that point across, then she was sure that Janet would want to talk to her. All she needed to do was convince Janet of the truth, and then they would meet and say their goodbyes.

Sam was aware that this had become a bit of an obsession, but she didn’t want to come of as that in the letter. She didn’t want Janet to know exactly how much of a mess she was.

So she went on and on about the alternate universes, and the reasons she wanted to talk to Janet, without any focus.

And then the guilt came, that she was forcing Janet into meeting her, into committing treason, and she couldn’t have that, she needed to assure Janet that it was her choice if they would meet or not.

In the end, she was left with a long and rambling letter, that she wasn’t sure if made any sense, but it was what she had, and she was going to send it, and hope for the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the point where I consider things start to change (and we'll finally break from the paired chapters format, even if only a bit). Grief and suffering are soon to be over.


	16. Dear Janet

Dear Janet,

I’m sure that this letter will come as a surprise to you, but I promise that this is real, and that I’ll explain everything, if you can read this to the end.

I’ll start with what I’m sure is your biggest shock.

Yes, this letter has been written by Samantha Carter, however, not by the Sam you might be thinking of, even though, in a way, I am the exact same person.

I’m not sure how to explain this, even though I’ve spent the last few days thinking only of that, and if I’m being honest, I have been thinking of how to explain this to you for a long time.

Can you recognize my handwriting? I wish I could be sure that you would see this and immediately know that it was authentic, that I wrote this, but I can’t remember if I ever wrote something down for you. We use computers so much at the base, and love notes would be too much of a giveaway, and we never wanted to risk that.

I’m sure the word ‘love’ must have made you anxious, but this is a calculated risk. I know that you live alone and I know that Cassie won’t be home until the weekend, and I left this here after you logged the end of your shift at the base, so it wouldn’t be here long enough to be found by someone else.

I know, this is a terrible invasion of your privacy, and if I had found any other way, I wouldn’t have sought so much information about you. I understand if you are angry about that, I think I would be too. I promise I looked only at the SGC’s registries, and nothing else, but even that already told me all that I needed to know.

I don’t want you to feel stalked, so before anything else, I need to tell you that if you signal me that you don’t want us to meet, I will forget about your universe, and I will never contact you again.

I’m sorry, I’m not making any sense.

I planned on things being more clear, but I have written and rewritten this so many times that I can’t stand this anymore, even though I know this is my one chance of seeing you again. Which is to say, if you think this is confusing, it’s a good thing that you didn’t see the other versions of this letter.

I’ll start over, but I want you to keep the things that I’ve said in mind.

My name is Samantha Carter, and I didn’t die on P3X-666. Samantha Carter died on P3X-666. Both of those statements are true.

How can I make this make any sense?

I know that Sam died on the mission on P3X-666, with a shot through the head, and that her death was instantaneous. I also know that anyone could have been hit instead of her, and the reason why I know this is because, on my universe, I wasn’t… Sam wasn’t the one to die. Janet was.

Yes, I know this is hard to process, even knowing that parallel universes are real. I had trouble accepting this too, even though I knew how the multiple universes worked.

To be more clear, when I say that, in a way, I am the exact same person that died on P3X-666, what I mean to say is that we share a past, up to that point. So I’m the person that your Sam would have turned into, if she had lost you on that mission, instead of dying.

Our universes were only recently separated, which is rare when we are talking about coming in contact with an alternate reality. More specifically, our universes were separated on that mission, based on which one of us died.

Strangely enough, I wasn’t able to find a single universe in which we went to P3X-666 on that day and no one died, although I did find a few in which both of us survived and someone else died. I don’t know why this seems significant to me, but it does.

I’m so sorry, I know I must be confusing you so much with this. I hesitated in sending this letter, because I didn’t want to disrupt your life, but part of me couldn’t let go of the idea that you would want to see me just as much as I want to see you now.

I know it’s been months, but I still can’t stand to live in a world where I’ll never be able to see you again, even if you’re not the same person that I lost, not exactly.

My Janet died on P3X-666, but up to that moment, you lead the exact same life that she did, so you are closest version of her to still live, and believe me when I say that I have investigated many universes until I found this one.

I hope that I’m right to think that this letter will be welcome. I want to think that I know you, that I knew you, enough to know that. If I’m not, burn this letter, destroy it, ignore that you ever read it. I promise I won’t think less of you, and that I won’t be upset or disappointed.

I want to see you again, and nothing would stop me, except your own will. If you don’t want to see me, I’ll stay away, and you’ll never hear of me again.

But there is one reason why I think that you will want to see me again, and that is because I love my Janet, and I know that you love your Sam too, and this is the closest thing either one of us will ever get to any real closure.

I know it’s not the same thing, that you are not my Janet, and that I am not your Sam. I know that, this isn’t about pretending that our loved ones didn’t die. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them to pretend that their deaths didn’t happen.

I also know that we each have our own places in our own universes and neither one of us is going to leave them, this isn’t about being reunited like that either. After all, even if we ignored our work, our mission, I know that neither one of us would leave Cassie behind, and only one version of her can exist in each universe.

Yes, I have been taking care of Cassie since you, since my Janet died. Although ‘taking care’ isn’t the best way to put it. She keeps wanting to do so much by herself, even though I tell that she doesn’t have to.

She told me that she always thought I would be the one to die on a mission, and I wonder if this means that your Cassie was ready for my death, and if that made her suffer less. I hope it did, I held Cassie in my arms while she cried, and would never wish that suffering on her again.

I wonder if you know, and I can tell this is also true for your Sam, because I have felt this way since before our universes separated, that I love her like a daughter, and that you two were my family.

I’m sorry about the stain. I wasn’t supposed to cry, I had more than enough time to put my emotions in order, and yet here I am. Just thinking of everything I lost breaks my heart all over again.

I cried at the SGC, when my Janet died. In front of everyone, there’s even video of that. So that should tell you how bad I have been at keeping our secret, but it’s ok, I managed to fake well enough, to hide my emotions too deep to be found.

Which is probably not healthy, but considering everything I’ve done in the past few months, that’s the least of my concerns.

Which brings me to how I found you, and how I’m able to be communicating with you.

I found a device that allows me to communicate with other universes, and I have looked through many of them until I found yours.

Don’t worry, it doesn’t work like the quantum mirror, it’s not a two-way door. Only the person (or people, I suppose, although I haven’t had the chance to test it) that are holding it are capable of communicating with another universe.

Any objects that I’m touching while holding the device can also communicate, which was how I hacked into the SGC and managed to gather so much data. Although hacked isn’t the best word. Would you believe that my credentials hadn’t been revoked? A terrible oversight, really.

So I came to your house (well, my house in my universe, I moved in after you died to help Cassie with some real state issues, but that’s not really important) and connected to your universe. I didn’t cross all the way through, but I did leave behind this letter, because I needed to talk to you, and I figured that just showing up in your room wouldn’t have been a good idea.

I want to see you, I want to talk to you, even if just one time.

So if you want the same thing, please give me a sign.

I will open the connection again in three days, at 1900 hours. I’ll keep it open for five minutes. If you are here and you are alone, I will cross over, if you are not, I’m going to close the connection and I will never bother you again.

I know this is too much to drop on you, but I couldn’t find a better way to do this.

If you give me a chance, maybe I can explain things better in person, although I’m not sure that I can explain everything that was going through my mind when I decided to go through with this plan. I’m not even sure that I can justify to myself all that I have done.

If someone had told me months ago that I would be hiding technology from the SGC, and that I would be risking everything to come in contact with another universe, I wouldn’t have believed, so I understand if you don’t believe it either, but all I can say in my defense is that losing you, losing Janet, changed me in a way that I would never have imagined.

I wondered if the same thing happened to you, or if you have been able to cope better than I have. I always found that you were better at these things, more in touch with your feelings, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you moved on already.

But even if you have, I urge you, please, just give me this one chance to say goodbye.

I know, I know it’s not the same thing, I know this won’t change the fact that my Janet died because I couldn’t protect her, and it won’t change the fact that your Sam is dead. Nothing can change that, but this is not what I’m trying to do.

All I know is that you are the one person that can understand what I’m going through, and that many times now I thought that if I could talk to you, I would find a way to get better.

I didn’t just lost the love of my life, I lost my best friend, and I could use my best friend back, even if just one more time.

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be saying this. I don’t want to pressure you into meeting me, because I know that this is not an easy decision.

I won’t hold this against you, if you decide for whatever reason that this isn’t what you want, and I want you to know that you are not my only hope of getting over what happened, so you don’t need to feel guilty if you decide not to meet me.

I await your response in three days, and I hope that, whichever choice you make, it’s the right one for you.

Sincerely yours,  
Sam


End file.
